The rise of fake engine noise | Hacker News Reader

The rise of fake engine noise

washingtonpost.com

217 pointssmacktoward292 comments

This may be a transient problem as people get used to new technology. It's like using Filmlook to put scratches and grain on HD video.

The 2013 Lotus Evora, a series hybrid vehicle with an electric motor and a fixed gearbox, took this to the point of silliness. Not only did they provide fake engine sounds, they provided shift paddles and required the driver to shift software-simulated gears. They even provided a momentary loss of power during simulated gear shifting. (http://www.autoblog.com/2013/01/22/lotus-pondering-fake-shif...) The driver could select different sounds, or turn all this off and just let the electric motor do its thing, which yielded better acceleration. Here's a demo of all the sound options: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1CzoqEyACQ). Options include simulated straight-6, American V-8, and V-12 engines, plus some turbine-like sounds.

After some snickering from the automotive press, this feature was dropped from later models.

Many electric cars already have an outside noise generator, mandated by law in the EU and US. These switch off above 25 MPH or so, so they don't contribute to freeway noise.

The evora isn't a hybrid. There was a hybrid version in Europe.

As long as there is an option to turn all of it off, I don't have a single problem with it. It actually sounds quite cool.

My first thought to this article was where's the speaker so i can desolder it.

I don't mind the gimmicks and trickery some people like the deception however I want to be able to get rid of it.

However if it plays in the regular speaker system and there's no off button it will get annoying very quickly.

Or physical tubes which pump sound back from the engine well to the driver.

Craziness.

Filmlook to put scratches and grain on HD video

Quite popular in videogames as well.

"These switch off above 25 MPH or so, so they don't contribute to freeway noise."

Ugg. So they only contribute to the destruction of the street-level soundscape to the detriment of walkers, cyclists, sidewalk cafes, and birds.

It's dangerous if pedestrians and cyclists expect to hear cars and they approach silently.

Maybe they shouldn't expect that then. Lots of cities have trolleybuses, trams, and other electric transport without carnage on the roads.

Trams aren't as silent due to the rails.

As a cyclist, I can confirm that, unfortunately, the pedestrians do rely on sound quite a lot in figuring out whether a vehicle is dangerous: if you're silent, they won't try to avoid you that much. Sometimes it becomes ridiculous: a pedestrian looks in your direction and proceeds walking across, in the middle of the street, forcing you to brake to a halt. They don't do that to cars.

Clearly not scalable in the future, where amount of electric vehicles will keep increasing (not just cars: scooters and e-bikes too). I'm a fairly passionate pedestrian but we can't expect to be able to stay safe by hearing alone.

Consideration for blind people is an important argument but it seems so much saner to require quiet vehicles to have a radio transponder that can send exact speed and direction rather than having people identify these by hearing beeps or fake engine noise.

Not following. How do radio signals help a kid stepping off a curb? Not everybody owns a phone; not everybody has it on and running the 'don't get run over' app.

We've been trained as a people to respond to environmental cues. The learning period to adjust to different cues (beeps, phone apps etc) is another phrase for 'lots of people get hit by silent cars'.

I'd suggest a period of dual cues - make noise, AND whatever else we imagine could help us not get run over. Eventually the noise part might fade away.

Radio signals to help blind people, replacing sound.

The learning period for "vehicles don't make noise at speeds that can kill you" has already begun. Priuses have been around for 10 years.

Until a sizeable fraction of the cars on the road are silent, the learning period has not yet significantly begun.

Great, so it's begun in Vancouver and San Francisco. Forefront of transportation :)

A car would have to be some sort of magical hovercraft to approach silently, because tires rolling on asphalt make lots of noise whether the engine contributes or not.

This is true, but as a cyclist, often the sound of my own tires on the road, plus the wind in my ears and sometimes even my own breathing, masks the road noise of an oncoming electric car.

Reasonable point - I was thinking about it only from the perspective of a pedestrian, as I don't ride a bicycle myself.

I was almost run over by a Nissan Leaf 2 weeks ago because it crept up behind me on soft snow. It was only going about 5-10 km/h. They could definitely manage to kill a child.

They contribute to being heard by walkers and cyclist relying on their ears to know whether a car is coming, which is the legal point of adding these things (and why they can be disabled at high speed)

I am a former Los Angeles bike commuter, and a current walking-commuter (can't think of an elegant word for that). I very much appreciate knowing when a car is coming, but the constant roar on the every street means that conversations have to stop when a truck drives by, you can't hear people talking even when they're only 6 or 7 feet from you, and any sound quieter than an internal combustion engine is diminished. It has left our city streets' as sad, desolate landscapes in many places. If we want to add noise to cars, let them have a bell, like bicycles.

I could walk around screaming at the top of my lungs to warn people when I'm walking by, but maybe I should just try not to hit them instead (and face prison time if I kill someone by doing so.)

Vehicular homicide is already a thing bro.

not to turn this into a debate about street safety, but it's rarely prosecuted unless there's another crime attached (being drunk/leaving the scene/etc) or some motive beyond "i wasn't paying attention".

>but maybe I should just try not to hit them instead

There's one situation where drivers don't face penalties if they hit and injure/kill a pedestrian: if that pedestrian caused the accident and the driver had no way of preventing it.

For example, if a pedestrian assumes there is no traffic and steps into the road without looking, just feet from an oncoming-but-silent car.

Source please. I don't believe this is the case.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/30/opinion/why-drivers-get-aw...

You don't believe what? You don't believe that pedestrians can step into traffic? Or you don't believe that drivers can get away with no punishment if pedestrians step in front of them without giving them time to stop? I'm not looking up a source because it's so ridiculous that I'm not even sure there's a law on the books about it, but if you walk into the side of my (moving) car and get hurt, that's your fault, not mine.

You know those tire commercials where a kid goes running out into traffic between cars in a residential neighborhood and the driver is happy they had Michelin tires because they were able to stop in time? Imagine the kid ran out half a second later. Should the driver be charged?

Again, I'm not sure what's unbelievable about anything I said.

We disagree on a more basic level.

I know people can run in to the street without warning. I know drivers get away with no punishment if somebody darts in to the street.

In fact, my point was that drivers get away with no punishment _almost every time they kill a pedestrian_. In NYC they have less than a 5% chance of even being arrested, much less convicted. Driving a car is probably a great way to commit murder.

Also, yes, I think the driver should be charged for driving so fast in a residential neighborhood that they can't stop in time to prevent killing a kid. If I recklessly [flew my helicopter/drove my tank/rammed my hovercraft/ran my bobsled] in to a child it would be met with outrage, so why do we apply different rules to automobiles? (Spoiler - because automobiles are convenient and while we claim otherwise, we just don't care enough about dead kids to change culture).

http://freakonomics.com/2014/05/01/the-perfect-crime-a-new-f...

I think you're disagreeing with something I never said. From what I understand, you're asking me for a source stating that drivers can hit someone and not be at fault, while your argument is that drivers are never at fault? I guess I still don't get what kind of source you're asking me for.

But apparently you believe there is such a thing as a speed so low that you cannot hit a pedestrian. Have you ever watched some Russian dashboard camera footage where pedestrians throw themselves at cars that are sometimes completely stopped? Or my previous example of someone walking into the side of your car? I've had that happen, where a bicyclist ran through an intersection without looking and ended up in the back of my pickup truck. Tell me that's my fault. The responding officer sure didn't.

This is apparently a downvote magnet but to clarify, you wrote:

    "There's one situation where drivers don't face penalties if they hit and injure/kill a pedestrian: if that pedestrian caused the accident and the driver had no way of preventing it."

This is the statement with which I disagree. There are many situations where drivers don't face penalties if they hit and injure/kill a pedestrian, not just one. Anyway, my views on this are clear and I am obviously in the minority. Regardless, I still think that if one operates a heavy, dangerous vehicle near people who may be killed by it the onus of responsibility for not killing people falls on the driver.

If a person leaps in front of a big rig in order to kill themselves, then no, the driver is not responsible. If a kid runs after a soccer ball in the street and gets run over because they driver didn't stop in time, then the driver was probably going too fast for the circumstances.

Mind you, I like cars. I may walk to work but I drive very quickly on the autobahn a few times a year and it's a blast. Limited access roadways with _incredibly_ good visibility and road conditions are great places to go fast. Cities and towns with cars, bikes, walkers, and anything else you can imagine all using the same street space are great places to go slow.

I think that's a misunderstanding, or a misinterpretation of what I meant. I didn't say "there is only one situation", I said "there is one situation".This could be interpreted as "only one" or as "one of many". I meant it in the context of "one of many". There's an implied "there's (at least) one situation", but without that explicitly stated, you're right that there could be an implied "there's (only) one situation".

So allow me to clarify my original post: There's at least one situation where drivers don't face penalties.

And then let me word it a little more strongly: There's only one situation where drivers, under the law, don't face penalties: when the driver was not at fault. Because the situations you listed are those where the driver legally could have faced penalties but did not.

Pedestrians can be at fault for an accident with a car.

"Here are a few common scenarios under which a pedestrian may be found at least partially at fault for an accident involving a vehicle:

* jaywalking, or crossing in the middle of the street, outside of a crosswalk

* crossing against the traffic signal (i.e. in the crosswalk but against a red "Do Not Walk" command)

* entering a street or highway while intoxicated, and

* walking along highways, bridges, or causeways where pedestrian access is prohibited."

http://www.alllaw.com/articles/nolo/auto-accident/pedestrian...

I think the counter-argument is "This is guaranteed to save a few lives over the years". It may not be great for every condition, particularly mid-town Manhattan or Los Angeles, but in other cities, having a car engine sound does alert people walking that something is coming.

I have traveled extensively in the city, both on legs and bike, and I commute on my bike daily. The noise polution is already at a point where you cannot tell if a small efficient cars is approaching. Hell, you can barely hear a Mercerdes AMG with a massive 6L engine. Unless the goal is to make people aware of a car in otherwise reasonably quite environments, it's pointless to require. That said, Teslas do not have to emit any fake noises in Denmark, and I can STILL hear the tire noise when it's driving past me.

As someone who lives in a place where cycling traffic (i.e., completely silent traffic) is massive (Amsterdam), I would suggest this is just a matter of careless habit in a car dominated society.

The only people not looking, relying in their ears and therefor constantly causing dangerous traffic situations over here are tourists. Those are the only ones blindly stepping into traffic because they don't hear the bicycles coming and therefor assume there is no traffic.

The need to have traffic go "vroom, vroom" in order to avoid accidents is just pathetic, and utterly unsustainable in a future where all traffic is likely to be silent by nature.

Imagine living a place that would be as nice an quiet as a village on a sunday if it wasn't for all those vehicles creating artificially amplified noise pollution. Ridiculous.

I agree. It's just a matter of getting used to checking for cars visually. You already have to do that with bikes when crossing bike lanes.

During a transition period I can see it being a problem since listening for cars it can be a strong habit. I had problems with cross walks in the US at first since many of them don't emit a sound when it's green. I would often stand around subconsciously waiting for the sound to indicate that I can cross, and I'd miss my turn.

I remember reading 20 years ago about Lotus developing fake engine noise using an Esprit mule vehicle containing a tiny compact engine.

The Esprit was historically a 4-pot, so never sounded that great. Until they added the V8 and it was a monster.

Options include simulated straight-6, American V-8, and V-12 engines, plus some turbine-like sounds.

This is like changing ringtones on your phone. Can I download a twin turbo?

There have been aftermarket speaker setups to emit the "choosh" sound of the wastegate opening marketed to the ricer crowd for years.

Surely you are not using the term "ricer crowd" to refer to Asians?

Slow down there P.C. police. Ricer is a term for people who tackily modify japanese imports.

I'm not policing anything. But the term "rice rocket", shortened to "ricer", is indeed derogatory towards Asians. Language matters.

I think it refers to enthusiasts of Asian-made cars. Not much better, though.

Not quite. It's people who take these imports, and then add awful, flashy mods to them

> Surely you are not using the term "ricer crowd" to refer to Asians?

No, he's using it to refer to Asian vehicles (and colloquially, people immersed in the culture surrounding them). It's a bit racist, but more of a subcultural epithet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice_burner

Really? I always thought that "ricer" was a word play on "racer", a funny term used to describe idiots in their pimped out cars who think they are racers.

(This is more my personal opinion, and less sourced)

I think the "rice" word (aside from the racial connotations) came from the stereotypical first modification being an absurdly large exhaust to try and lower the frequency of the typically smaller, higher-rev'ing / turbo'd Asian engines.

A noticeably large cylinder shoehorned on to the back of your car? Rice cooker.

I was under the impression 'rice' in this context stood for Racing Inspired Consmetic Enhancement.

To me, the term "rice burner" has always evoked a comparison to rice-cookers, which are typically cheap, small appliances. Its the kind of term that was more apt when Asian automakers mainly imported compact cars to the US, and is becoming less so as they branch out to other models. (e.g. Toyota Tundra) In the pantheon of racist terminology, its about the least-bad.

The subculture to whom I'm referring wear the badge proudly, like I do "geek".

Dunno about twin turbo, but:

http://www.soundracer.se/?p=98

I just had a look at the legislation. It wisely includes that the noise has to sound similar to the engine noise produced by a similarly sized combustion vehicle. I was wondering if we would start to see the equivalent of ringtones for cars (though with some people's ice setups that already sort of exists).

I still want one that makes the sounds of the vehicles in The Jetsons. Why aren't loadable and customizable sounds a thing?

If the sounds are too different from existing mental models, they won't be associated with oncoming traffic?

It will probably sound enough out-of-place to get attention. But it doesn't help with the stigma of electric cars being toylike.

Go with something menacing, like the sound a TIE Fighter makes. Attention getting, futuristic, and you won't feel like you're riding around on Scooty-Puff Jr.

What digikata said. The law doesn't require outside noise for your benefit, it requires it in the hopes that the people in front of you will hear you coming and get out of the way.

It would be good to have a rigid specification for this kind of thing, same as for the colour and blink frequency of signal lights, road sign designs and number plate fonts. Predictability and standardisation is super valuable on the road.

However, I see no reason why the specification can't specify a particular electronic burbling noise from The Jetsons.

While browsers can't decide on a format for the Internet I can't imagine what kind a mess the auto industry could come up for custom sounds for cars. But the arguments would be funny to listen to, 2 guys in a pub, the first boasting about how his Mustang is lossless, the other disregarding due to background noise and file size.

Recently drove a Tesla Model S P85D... best thing about it is that the torque is immediate and silent. Not only can you blow other cars away at lights, you can do it casually, with no noise or fuss. Car is here; put car over there. It's like piloting a UFO.

The article makes it sound like that is going to have to go away, if laws are passed to make electrics play fake engine noise.

I just wonder, why does it have to be engine noise in particular? If I saw a Tesla, Leaf, Volt, etc. I wouldn't expect any engine or exhaust noise. Beeping, maybe.

Beeping? Like a lorry backing up? Even a low pitch beeping would become annoying pretty quickly. It should just be a sort of hum.

A hum would work just as well. I was just trying to think of a noise I would expect from an electric device, and beeping was the first thing that came to mind. It's better than coil whine at least.

Lorries are switching to white noise instead of beeping, because humans hear that better. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fa28lIGuxq8

I'd love Tesla to license https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdWswvLPdE0

I expect there'll be a new set of businesses built up around custom engine noises. If the manufactures don't make it easy to load your own MP3, then you'll probably be able to take it to a car mod specialist.

Expect to hear this a lot more often then https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI6nc3aH_pI

Domino's Pizza did something like this with their electric scooters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n17B_uFF4cA

Classical music would be pretty awesome.

Benny Hill theme, played at a speed that matches the car’s speed.

I'd prefer La Cucaracha

You see a car, you expect engine noise, that's all.

I have a Leaf. The sound is precisely what you'd expect for "electric car noises".

Don't you see any problem with the silence in terms of safety?

There is a reason bicycles need to have a bell. Because these you also cannot hear when they approach you.

Although, it would be funny seeing a Tesla with a nice little bell and the tacked on law that you have to use it to alarm others in front of you that you are approaching. That'll be a sight to behold.

I was once almost hit by a Tesla, because I didn't hear it coming. Fortunately, the driver noticed I wasn't aware of his presence and slowed down.

With a sane legal framework surrounding driving, the driver would need to be sure they were not going to hit you, rather than you needing to be sure you wouldn't be hit.

For a pedestrian hit by a car, legal liability is often not the main concern.

Though in some countries, hitting a pedestrian gets the driver an automatic jail term. Collisions with pedestrians don't happen all that often in such countries.

I'd still rather be the driver in that scenario (Which I believe was the parent's point)

I think I'd rather be neither.

I agree and I find that a far more civilized legal approach to cars, but I don't ever count on that happening in America.

You may legally in the right but only your heirs will care.

It's not the main concern for the pedestrian, but it may be for the driver. If legal liability is clearly on the driver then drivers will be more careful. At least, many will, even if not all.

In the end it does not matter. The pedestrian is the one needing the wheelchair afterwards.

On the one hand, you're right. On the other hand, a friend of mine was sued by the driver of the car that hit him to pay for cleaning his blood off of the car and fixing the dent his body left in the frame.

It'd be nice if they didn't add insult to injury.

In Germany it is generally the other way round, especially when children are involved. The driver of a car has to take care of pedestrians and cyclists. Even if a driver follows the rules perfectly fine, § 1.1 of the law (you have to take care of others) always beats the rest.

Interestingly, Germany is also the most wonderful place I know for a drive. They're well-trained, considerate, and skilled.

You get what you (let people) pay for. A drivers license costs ~1500€ here.

Well if your friend is the one responsible from the accident, then yes, he should be paying the car damages.

Sometimes it is pedestrian fault. I was nearly run over by a truck crossing the street trying not to miss a bus that took so long waiting.

It was entirely my fault had he killed me. Luckily I had good reflexes and jumped away, the truck hit my leg at over 100kms/hour while in the air and only made me a small bruise as it rotated in the air with little resistance.

Cars come equipped with horns for that exact purpose (alerting pedestrians, etc.), though they are often used as displeasure-signalling devices.

As a cyclist it's often helpful to be able to hear the sound made by cars moving across a street, for example, when approaching an intersection where perpendicular traffic should stop, but may not.

As a casual slow cyclist myself I already find it impossible to rely on audio too Mich, visuals are always needed. I have had several near collisions with other cyclists in the past who silently sneak up from behind or around corners. Afterwards I made sure to always look around before changing direction and treat every obscured corner as potential "devil puppet on a spring box" (no idea what they are called :) ).

I would love car traffic to be more silent but AFAIK the tires actually make most of the noise.

"devil puppet on a spring box" (no idea what they are called :) ).

I believe this is what you mean: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack-in-the-box

You're entirely right that we shouldn't rely on sensory input from our ears to drive or cycle. However, the fact of the matter is that many people use their hearing to supplement their other senses.

When I worked with deaf people as relay operator, a question asked by a coworker during our orientation session on deaf culture was 'How do deaf people drive if they can't hear sirens from emergency vehicles?' The answer is that they rely on their other input to and have learned to compensate for their lack of hearing. In effect they may be aware of these possibilities and check their rearviews more frequently to account for not being able to depend on auditory updates.

If all vehicles were completely silent, it would remove the benefit those of us with hearing gain from the additional input, even though this input isn't strictly speaking necessary. We could and would adapt, sure, but I think that additional factor when cycling does help in some situations. I can see engines making some noise to be advantageous, even if it only makes the difference of one fatality a year, because there is very little drawback.

> I would love car traffic to be more silent

A minor nitpick, but you can't get more silent than silent since silence is the absence of any noise.

Sure, but absolutes are rarely used in their literal meaning.

"Silence" doesn't refer to the absence of any noise, it refers to a very low level of noise. The absence of any noise at all is very difficult to achieve (although you can come close: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXVGIb3bzHI). The same goes for other absolutes like "black" (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vantablack is arguably "blacker" than other "black" materials).

You're technically correct (the best kind of correct), but your point is moot. Very few words that describe absolutes can be used "correctly" in practice. The logical conclusion is that these words (despite their dictionary definition) don't refer to actual absolutes but rather extremes: silence is not the absence of noise, it's just the presence of a significantly smaller amount of noise.

Heck, even words like "pregnant" aren't absolute in practice. With "pregnant" the implication commonly is "will give birth" (which is why we have euphemisms like "expecting"), so someone who is nearly due can be said to be "more pregnant" simply because they are closer to giving birth (and therefore also have a higher chance of delivering successfully) whereas someone within their first months of pregnancy may often not even want to disclose their state because so many things can still go wrong.

In practice "silent" or "black" is no more absolute than "cold" -- and it would be silly to expect people to refer to zero kelvin when they say "cold", don't you think?

Disclosure: I spent way too much time around linguists as a student.

On the other hand, logic has little to do with how language works. There are absolute and relative adjectives in English in the same way that there are count and non-count nouns, regardless of whether those semantic categories make any sense.

Damn, you couldn't have been any more on with that.

> silence is not the absence of noise, it's just the presence of a significantly smaller amount of noise.

Thanks for your explanation.

Considering that other animals can produce or hear sounds that humans can't, I guess I shouldn't have used the word 'any'? :)

When I think of silence I tend to think of passively cooled heatsinks or cases for PCs that do not produce any noise that I can hear (even up close). Compare that to a slow-spinning fan that can be effectively silent at a certain distance, but still produces an audible sound if you get really close.

> In practice "silent" or "black" is no more absolute than "cold" -- and it would be silly to expect people to refer to zero kelvin when they say "cold", don't you think?

You're right, although what one person thinks of as cold may not be what another person thinks of as cold. e.g. temperatures in winter in the UK vs Russia or the North Pole. It's all relative.

Thank you both very much for your comments. With English as a second language it is easy to never learn the true meaning of words. I feel quite stuck with my current level for several years already and tiny bits like these are great improvements. Cheers!

As a cyclist, it is much preferred to hear engine noice rather than honking horns.

Also as a pedestrian

I hope you've also fitted a noise-generator to your bike instead of the bell.

At city speeds, tire noise exceeds engine noise in many internal-combustion vehicles as well.

At highway speeds it definitely does, but not necessarily at city speeds as the speed is low (and a stationary car makes no tyre noise but combustion engine still makes some engine noise).

This of course also depends on the road surface and tyres. Where I live we have rough asphalt (with large granite chips sticking out) and rought tyres, at least in the winter. The highway noise is practically all from tyres.

> but not necessarily at city speeds as the speed is low

No, but often enough for it to be a factor. As a pedestrian I don't assume I can hear an engine.

> (and a stationary car makes no tyre noise but combustion engine still makes some engine noise)

Unless you have a start-and-stop, and it's approaching insanity to require that stopped petrol cars have speakers that make engine noise if they turn off the engine.

You know, deaf people have managed to survive by looking around before they step onto the road.

Anyone who thinks we need cars to make loud noises just so that everyone can feel safer, I will personally make sure to blare my horn as loudly as possible as I drive past their house at 2 am.

>You know, deaf people have managed to survive by looking around before they step onto the road.

And what about blind people?

That's a great solution if your not blind. Or navigating somewhere with poor sight lines like a parking garage.

In a hypothetical future where all city vehicles are electric, tire noise would be much more noticeable (whereas now it is drowning in engine noise).

I mean, cyclists are not required by law to continuously ring the bell when traveling at less than 25mph though. Cars have car horns; that seems like a better analogy to bicycle bells than the "external noise generators".

I'm sure it won't be long until Google's self-driving car automatically sounds the horn when it detects an imminent collision with a pedestrian or car.

My car has "cutout valves" on the exhaust which can bypass the muffler (making it louder), and I've noticed an interesting phenomenon: the car actually seems faster (to it's occupants) when it's in the quieter mode. I've dynoed it in both modes, the torque and horsepower curves are nearly identical, so it's not actually faster.

http://www.gizmag.com/soundracer-vx-sound-racer/34898/

The tester claims that the beefier engine noise made him a more aggressive driver, or something of that nature.

They you don't have enough backpressure to need a cutout valve. Why even have it on there at that point?

I like the sound (and I'm shameless about it).

I was a passenger in a Model S my friend owns the other day. The biggest thing I noticed was that we were able to have a conversation at very normal volume levels. I had never noticed that I always needed to speak up in a car- until I didn't need to.

I wouldn't mind some auditory feedback on engine performance, it can be very useful. I definitely don't want it to be simulated noise that's meant to approximate some fictional engine. Making it specific to what it is for and embedding more useful audio clues within it would be good (along with the ability to easily disable).

As someone who's owned a few older cars, the sound is one of the most useful early diagnostic tools. It tells you immediately how the engine is running. Often you can tell the difference between a cold engine and a hot engine running. Losing this entirely isn't necessarily a good thing, but neither is faking it, which is the worst of both worlds, no useful information conveyed (beyond possibly RPMs, depending on implementation) but noise nonetheless.

I drive a Leaf and a Volt, both technically electric cars. The sprinting power of an electric is pretty good, I often take modded civics off the line (stoplight) in the Leaf; the point being that electric cars can quickly move to a spot you don't anticipate them. The Volt has a 'pedestrian warning horn' that, when engaged by the driver, gently and rapidly beeps the horn to draw attention to the Volt. Since it is engaged by the driver, however; it does little if the driver isn't paying attention.

As a cyclist, I enjoy having good situational awareness, and electric cars can definitely be surprising when they pass you. Overall, though I enjoy the super quiet ride, I think we should require some warning noise (engine noise seems like a nice option) to alert other to the oncoming car. It makes it safer for the driver because people are less likely to do something unexpected, and safer for the other people because they have better situational awareness.

Perhaps when automated car drivers are the norm, we can move to silent cars; since they will be more vigilant than a person could ever be.

>>> As a cyclist, I enjoy having good situational awareness, and electric cars can definitely be surprising when they pass you.

The car could have a bell and "on your left" speaker. ;-)

A revving engine would be less disruptive. It's a noise that most of us filter out, except those in situations which make them on alert for oncoming traffic, e.g. pedestrians and cyclists.

Quite true. Also, my brain reacts to "on your left" by assuming that I can let my guard down, which would be the wrong reaction if it's a car.

This seems like the perfect use for something like a mini LIDAR you can mount on a bike that detects a car behind you and just lights up a couple of LEDs on the handlebars.

Forget the bike, I've always wanted a kit that would detect cars around my car and display them like a mini map. Maybe with high speed delta from my own highlighted.

I mostly bike around cities, and when I drive I have taken to cracking open a window because not being able to hear cars around me feels deeply disconcerting.

Wow - I thought it was just me !

Every cyclist has their own preferences, but for me, a rear view mirror really helps. I still turn and look if I have to change lanes or something like that, but keeping an "inventory" of what's behind me really helps avoid unnecessary surprises.

That or you can just listen for tire noise. Even electic cars are quite loud above 25 mph, or so, so it only really becomes a problem at stop lights. Even then, the distinctive power supply whine will let youn that a hybrid or electric is behind you.

Agreed about tire noise and whine, but the problem is level of ambient noise, and habit. If you have an IC car nearby, even idling, the electric one will be virtually silent.

I'm torn with the noise situation with EVs. On one hand, I obviously recognize the importance of pedestrians being made aware of nearby automobiles, especially those with vision impairment. But on the other hand, I feel that automobiles making constant loud noise is an antipattern. The reason that cars have always made constant loud noise isn't to notify pedestrians—it's because gasoline engines produce a lot of waste noise.

If in a parallel universe the first mass adopted automobiles operated silently, I don't think we would or should have eschewed them or put constant noise-makers on them. I suspect we would have done the same thing we actually did do, even in our world of gasoline automobiles: put a user-activated noise-maker on them and expect and require operators to use that device when appropriate.

I would generally agree about the origin of noises and their alternate purposes.

However, I would also suggest that it is a very strange, unearthly, or extrordinary phenomenon to have such a massive and fast-moving thing traversing in such silence.

For example, there are not elephants that travel so silently that they may accidentally trample rodents underfoot.

Alternatively, though, outerspace and underwater, things are much less certain regarding the danger of large masses moving quickly.

As a motor vehicle enthusiast, I think it's important to distinguish "real noises intentionally amplified by physical audio routing" and "electronic recordings or audio processing played through speakers."

I don't object to routing engine noises to the cabin to allow for a loud-feeling vehicle (without necessarily being loud to people outside the car). To me, this isn't fake. The driver experiences real engine noise, with efforts to circumvent sound-deadening that comes in modern cars.

Playing recorded engine noises and/or digitally transforming sound is fake to me. It's a lie. I haven't driven a car that does this, but my guess is that it's noticeably simulated.

What if real engine noise is recorded in one part of the car, and then played back in the cabin?

The Coconut Effect will come into play.

"I haven't driven a car that does this, but my guess is that it's noticeably simulated."

According to the article, BMW does this, and I can say from first-hand experience in a newer model that it's not noticeably simulated.

And folks are apparently already hacking their in-cabin sounds to sound like higher-performance models! (cf. http://jalopnik.com/someone-hacked-their-bmw-m135i-to-sound-... )

As neat as that sounds, I wonder what will happen when the amplifier and/or speakers start to give up the ghost in 5-10 years. I associate the word "BMW" with "wiring issues" so I'm skeptical of any system that requires unflinching reliability for the life of the car.

The 2015 Mustang with the turbo 4 cylinder has a similar system but the functionality can't be deactivated or tweaked in any way. Can you imagine the frustration of listening to the acoustic meddling through a blown speaker that you can't disable? I had a Lincoln Mark VIII where the stock amplifier fried itself when I was on the highway. It blasted static with wildly varying pitch at full volume for 5 minutes before I could safely pull over and pull the fuse. It was literally maddening.

Perhaps it's because I have no interest whatsoever in cars, but I have trouble seeing the distinction.

If the idea is that certain sounds are merely the side effect of attributes which are themselves desired for reasons other than their sound, like a powerful engine, then it seems like any intentional design to produce or amplify those sounds are completely useless. What the driver wants is the actual attributes which produce the sound as a side effect, and if those attributes are achievable and verifiable without hearing those certain sounds, then the driver should still be satisfied.

If, on the other hand, certain sounds are desirable on their own, because of aesthetics or whatever, then the driver should be satisfied if those sounds are produced, regardless of how they're produced.

Playback recordings are a facsimile. Even in my '08 1.6L Swift Sport I can very well hear and feel the exhaust pipe through the floor as it responds to various throttle inputs.

Haptic feedback is just as important to me as the sound, and is part of what makes a car feel alive, playful, and eager. IOW, fun.

I'm totally not against electric cars, but it just seems wrong to me to make them appear like what they're not (i.e IC engines). I'd rather enjoy a Tesla Roadster in its brisk silence than with any added artefact, especially one trying to mimic an ancient, physically unrelated technology.

> is part of what makes a car feel alive, playful, and eager. IOW, fun.

Car porn, literally.

Jings. In what world does anything being fun become 'literally pornography'...

It's becoming annoyingly common ("earth porn" for pictures of nature, etc). Your use of "Jings" however has brightened up my day. Crivvens!

Indeed, but that is (still) surely 'figuratively porn'. Call me a traditionalist, but 'literally porn' is for getting people turned on sexually.

That kind of wording has been polluted, as opposed to Jings, which I've literally heard for the first time.

Think of it this way. Enhancing the engine sound is like optimizing the acoustics of a concert hall - you're still listening to nothing but the sounds from the orkestra. Artifically playing a prerecorded engine sound, is like sitting in a room full of speakers and amplifiers. You still hear the orkestra, but only a prerecorded version. The result might be the same, but there are subtle differences.

I think that highlights the difference for me: you come to the orchestra to hear the music. People like the sound of a car revving because they associate it with engine power, but the revving itself isn't inherently desirable; can you imagine generations growing up without ever seeing a fuel-burning car, but still associating the loudness and deepness of a car's speaker's rumbling with its power?

People like the revving noise for the same reason a ringing bell makes a dog drool.

> the revving itself isn't inherently desirable

I'm not sure that is quite true. I like a deep rumbeling bass, anything from explosions, thunder, or music - I do however nok like higher frequency sounds, such as jet engines, or a 18k rpm F1 engine. A traditional large reving engine is like that low frequency sound.

> People like the revving noise for the same reason a ringing bell makes a dog drool.

But isn't that true for the vast majority of things we enjoy. People find different things beautiful, based on what they assosiate it with.

Just because the symbol's original meaning is no longer relevant doesn't mean we should get rid of the symbol. We still use a floppy disk as the save icon in every software, after all.

It's the same as hearing a recording of someone playing the violin vs. the real thing. Even with the best audio system you can still tell it's just a recording.

And I don't treat the sound the engine makes as a side effect of other attributes - it's just as important as acceleration or fuel consumption.

The real thing is also a recording, it's the memory of the music and the playing skill recorded in the violinist's mind, with the musician and his violin as the playback device rather than a speaker. You prefer the acoustic qualities of one type of playback device over the other, but that doesn't make it any more or less "real" for any commonly accepted definition of "real".

...I honestly can't tell if you are serious. Your argument is basically that everything is real, because sound coming from the speakers is no less real than the sound coming from an actual violin. Should I have used a term "artificial" then? Just like artificial diamonds are not the same as real diamonds, artificial sounds produced by a speaker are not the same as sounds made by a real violin. Like someone else said - the difference is the same as there is between attending a concert and sitting in your room listening to a CD. You could even argue that with a sufficiently advanced audio system, the aural experience is exactly the same, so technically they are the same. And that would be true, if humans were robots - but we experience a whole set of irrational emotions,and that's why a lot of people prefer being at a concert to listening to a recording, having real diamonds instead of mass-produced ones, or using actual sugar instead of sweeteners - even if the sensory experience produced is no "more or less "real" for any commonly accepted definition of "real". And that's why I would personally prefer having an actual combustion of fuel to be producing sounds in my car, instead of the speaker system , thank you.

Hey, preferring some playback devices because of your cultural background is just as valid as preferring some of them because they have higher pitches. You like what you like. But they're all "real".

Artificial doesn't make sense here because music is manmade to begin with. I don't think it would make sense to call an artisanal handmade telephone any less artificial than your factory-stamped Cisco IP phone. Diamonds are naturally occuring, so there is actually a distinction there. As the manufacturing process matures, that distinction will remain, but 99% of people just won't care. Like with salt.

In that case, it sounds like you wouldn't mind if a car was able to play audio recordings of engine noises that you could not distinguish from noises coming from the engine.

Ultimately it comes down to opinion, but for me, it matters for reasons of authenticity. I want the sound I'm hearing to be the actual sounds the engine in my car is making, even if there is no sound at all. Am I a fool for wanting authenticity?

As a fellow driving enthusiast, I agree. When shopping for my last car, the manufacturer's outgoing model had a sport exhaust setting but did not pipe exhaust noise into the cabin. The incoming model did. (Note this is an actual mechanical opening or tube, not BMW-style synthesized noise.)

I ended up with the special-edition outgoing model for other reasons, including greater horsepower, but wouldn't necessarily object to piping in exhaust noise. Playing back recorded engine noise, on the other hand, seems just wrong to me.

Tangentially, a neighbor one street over has a pair of Ferraris that he and his wife track at Laguna Seca. I can always hear when they drive by (rarely, they have other cars they use on a daily basis) and it's a splendid exhaust note.

Say goodbye to that note; the newer cars will be turboed which muffles the noise significantly.

This reminds me of the trams in Manchester, which play the recorded sound of a horn through some little tinny speaker. I'm sure it's cheaper than having an actual noise-making device (I think other trams use bells?), but it sounds ridiculous.

If you're going to fake it, you should at least do a good job of it.

Living in Manchester, this amuses me too.

This discussion is very reminiscent of the debate over skeuomorphic user interfaces. As with the transition from physical interfaces to virtual ones, which has drawn interface designers towards the use of skeuomorphic elements to varying extents over the years, we are in another period of technological transition away from normally aspirated internal combustion towards quieter, more efficient means of making motion. To ease the transition for the conservative masses, some degree of skeuomorphism will be needed at first (although I personally think that creating synthetic engine noise is a horrible, horrible idea!).

I feel the same way. I have a 1982 Chevy C10 pickup, and the original owner had put "Flowmaster" pipes on it for a louder, but still natural, sound. With the original engine, it sounded impressive, perhaps more so than the engine actually was.

Not long after I got the truck, the original 305ci engine gave up the ghost (it had over 400,000 miles so it had had a great run) and I had a 350ci engine built for it and installed. None of the pipes were changed, and the exhaust manifold was a factory fit version for that new engine, not custom headers. Still, the sound difference was night and day. Now the truck positively thunders, where it merely growled before. While a lot of its sound can be attributed to the custom pipes and muffler, a lot of it is in the engine too.

To me, it's similar to the difference between a miked acoustic guitar and an acoustic-electric. Either way it's amplification, but the former sounds pure and natural, whereas the latter sounds forced and way too bright, and loses out on the nuances of left-hand technique and right-hand flourishes, as it only picks up the string vibrations themselves instead of the entire ambiance.

In Amsterdam one of the bigger reasons given for the reduction of speeds on some roads is that it reduces the noise pollution. It would seem backwards to require cars to make more noise than they strictly have to. That said in mixed traffic situations it may save some lives, so essentially this proves all those guys that drove without dampers in their exhausts and bumper stickers saying 'loud pipes save lives' right after all.

I think once the background noise of IC engines has disappeared and we can all hear normally again that this will pass, it's just the intermediate period when we can't hear the electric cars over the noise of the rest of the traffic.

Most of this noise is pumped into the car (to make the consumer happy), not out of the car. The two most common systems in use today are the car stereo (either amplifying the real engine's sound or by simply synchronizing a synthesis mechanism to the engine's load conditions) or a "sound pipe" which runs from the engine's air intake into the cabin ventilation system.

This article strangely managed to conflate the two by bringing up external electronic car noisemakers, which are entirely unrelated in both purpose and execution to the noisemaking devices explained throughout the rest of the article.

If my car would make less noise I'd be happy. It totally baffles me why someone would want more useless noise in their lives rather than less if that's an option. Music is beautiful, artificial engine noise is just that: noise.

The sound of an approaching Merlin V12 at full throttle is the most thrilling sound in the world.

http://www.amazon.com/Sigh-Merlin-Spitfire-Alex-Henshaw/dp/0...

"For anyone who has heard a Merlin engine on any aircraft, you will understand the title."

No stereo has ever been able to reproduce that sound.

Nostalgia can be insatiable, sure.

It would only be nostalgia if you found it attractive because of an old memory you had. If you put someone in a car with a V-12 engine there is a very good probability that they would find the sound exciting, even if they never heard it before. That has absolutely nothing to do with nostalgia.

I think a lot of people like the roar of a reving engine during acceleration. Crusing on the highway, I'll take one quiet engine please. Inccidently, that is exactly what Ford have done in some of the newer ST model - during normal driving, the sound is not enhanced. However, when you accelerate the sound symposer system route more engine noise to the driver so they still get the roar, even though the engine is a downsized FI engine.

>>Music is beautiful, artificial engine noise is just that: noise.

That's just your opinion man. I frequently turn off the stereo in my car to listen to the engine sound instead. Not everyone has to like the same thing.

Some music is beautiful. I'm sure there are a lot of people out there who would classify the music you enjoy as "useless noise" and can't understand why you'd willingly subject yourself to it.

A lot of people out there enjoy engine noise. People like different things, that's just how the world is.

Am I the only one that associates loud noise with a weak engine?

To me a powerful car just has an acceleration whine, and that's all.

It's like a rocket exhaust: the "wilder" it is the weaker it is. A powerful, well tuned, rocket has a very sharp, and clean (i.e. not noisy) flame.

Same with a car - if it's making a lot of noise, it's poorly tuned or designed.

It's not just you. It's also other people who don't have much experience with engine performance. Quieter mufflers restrict more airflow, something you don't want to do when you're trying to pass more fuel through a small engine.

I have plenty of experience with engine performance, and s/he was absolutely correct. An overly loud engine is is opening its valves too early or closing too late, and it can only be made quieter by restrictive mufflers. More modern and efficient engine designs, enabled by technologies such as variable valve timing, are quieter out of the valves because they convert more energy into motion instead of sound. Being quieter, they also have less pressure, and are less affected by muffler restrictiveness. Straight pipes might make a 1969 charger more powerful, but the effect on a modern V8 like the BMW N63 is negligible.

The most dramatic example is VTEC, especially before variable cam phasing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuned_exhaust

Tuned exhaust are only "in tune" at a particular rev range where the resonant frequency of the exhaust manifold is in sync with the engine combustion cycles. They're not widely used outside of racing applications, because a road vehicle has relatively wider rev range than a racing machine. And they're ridiculously loud.

A vintage Cosworth DFV racing engine only "works" at 7000-9000 rpm (or 8000-10000 rpm for later models), a pre-turbo 2000s F1 car runs at 11000-15000 rpm to about 14000-20000 rpm (before rev limits were enforced). It's a really narrow band compared to a road car that can run from 1000-6000 rpm, ie. is useful on the entire rev range.

All modern engines have well engineered exhaust manifolds, though, but they're not really "resonance charged" like a tuned racing exhaust.

Every joule which goes into making noise is a joule which isn't being used to make the machinery go.

The energy lost to sound is minimal, and often there simply isn't an economic way to prevent those losses without reducing performance.

You're probably not alone, but I don't think that opinion is popular, either. The reason why many people associate loud engines with powerful (IC) engines is because powerful engines, such as those found in racing cars, are loud. Often very loud. It's also not possible to make them quiet without sacrificing performance.

If you meant to say that you don't think much of IC engines in general, you could've just called them inefficient and be done with it.

I know very little about cars and have little interest in them, but I suspect that any desirable attributes of an engine or car can be measured directly. If I were buying a car with those attributes as a goal, I would look for statistics taken from direct measurements, which I presume exist in plenty on car enthusiast websites and magazines.

I would guess that, given any level of performance, there are well-designed cars that vary greatly in the amount and character of the sound they produce, especially since the advent of electric vehicles.

> Am I the only one that associates loud noise with a weak engine?

Evidently you haven't been to a top fuel drag race!

Most definitely, the more power, the more noise. Top fuel is so loud it is like being punched in the chest.

A top fuel racer is very loud because they have short, per-cylinder exhaust pipes and are powered by nitromethanol ("top fuel"), which burns so slowly that the fuel is still exploding when exiting the exhaust pipes.

They are also ridiculously inefficient.

They're very efficient if you measure efficiency in terms of HP for engine weight, which is about all that matters in drag racing :)

Well sure, that's why they use nitromethanol (which is worse in kJ/kg than gasoline, but it contains an oxidizer) and ridiculous engines.

But "efficiency" in the context of engines usually means energy conversion efficiency. And power-to-weight ratio is what you mean.

Sure, but power and efficiency are different things!

Bigger engines are noisier because more "explosions happen inside" (to simplify). A bigger engine isn't necessarily more powerful than a smaller one, but it's a hint.

>Same with a car - if it's making a lot of noise, it's poorly tuned or designed.

Easily disproved. F1 cars produce about 600 horsepower, are extremely performant, and are loud as fuck.

F1 cars... are loud as fuck.

Formula one's new V6 engines are so quiet that they caused a lot of controversy when first introduced:

http://www.f1fanatic.co.uk/2014/06/17/f1-spectators-say-new-...

Oh really? That's hilarious.

The only race I've been to was in the early 2000's so it was a different engine back then.

3 Litre V10 or 12 oh yes quite different. Long gone are those sounds. Down to 1.6L v6 now is something like what 20% of that displacement? Still nearly as powerful.

Since 2014, F1 cars have a turbo charger and a single exhaust pipe in a very clever hybrid drive system with two electric motor-generator units. In case you didn't follow F1 last year, there was a lot of complaints about the lack of noise.

The noise coming out of the exhaust pipe is wasted energy. In previous years, this wasted energy was utilized by putting the exhaust pipes to blow the diffuser, creating more aerodynamic downforce.

The 2014 F1 cars consume a lot less fuel (fuel tank is 100 liters vs. 190 liters in 2013), with very little loss in actual performance.

Nope. A tiny 1.0L 3-cylinder engine will be loud all over and make a horrible whine as it accelerates. That's weak. You hear the engine "scream" without doing much. While a large 5.0L V8 makes a pleasant hum while accelerating hard(almost like the rocket whizz you described - it's powerful but controlled), and is virtually silent while idling. That's what I associate with power.

A muffler restricts the exhaust and will lead to decreased power from the engine, even for properly tuned engines. Removing the muffler will remove the restriction in the exhaust and undo the power decrease, and also increase the noise.

This is not strictly true. Some engines work better with back-pressure, and removing or altering the exhaust without re-tuning usually loses power: http://www.formula1-dictionary.net/exhaust_road_perf.html

I can attest to that, my old Saab performed terribly (performance and fuel economy) during the time I was running around with a pierced and corroded exhaust mid-section flexi-joint.

You'd think some people would want to opt out of the fake/amplified engine noise, so they can drive in peace, listen to their stereo without interference, etc. but i guess making the amplified/fake engine noise an option would defeat the purpose.

I can see it now: Added option - reduced engine noise $500.

Charging the buyer a one time fee to "disconnect a wire".

Which will be illegal to disconnect yourself.

DMCA violation!

I see you're a BMW owner.

Don't worry, it won't be disconnect a wire, but change a bit in the compute unit and make sure the compute unit code and data are cryptographically signed and that its signature is verified by all other compute units so that you may not even start the engine should you decide to alter it.

Is this article about engine or exhaust noise?

I prefer quiet exhausts, and it's nice to hear the engine itself sometimes when I deliberately select too low a gear.

I look at loud exhausts with disdain, and think they show childishness, insecurity or narcissism.

This is hardly new. In college, we had a guest lecture from a mechanical engineer at $POPULAR_MOTORCYCLE_MANUFACTURER. He described how his team cooked up a new engine design that achieved some significant performance increase over the old design. Only problem? It didn't sound like a $POPULAR_MOTORCYCLE.

The new engine was delayed for a year while they cooked up a mechanical noisemaker to adjust the sound.

Harley Davidson filed for a sonic trademark on their engine sound back in 1994[0]. (I think it failed, not sure.) But it's pretty easy to reproduce the sound to remind people:

Potato, potato, potato, potato, potato, ...

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_trademark

According to http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-06/20/harley-davids... they are working on a new sound for the electric Harley-Davidson.

If I recall correctly The sound originally came from cost cutting engineering choices. Beyond the fairly tight angle (a little over 60 degrees) which gives you a asymmetric "gap" between ignitions, they simplifies the ignition timing so that it fired every stroke instead of every other stroke. So the exhaust strokes had a little ignition going on due to unspent fuel/air, giving the quieter sounds. Not a good design for efficiency but it sure gave them a distinctive idle.

At some point the engine noise just becomes completely arbitrary. Avertisers will buy out your engine noise sounds, as you pass by in your Telsa furniture warehouse salesmen will scream from the engine compartment.

Eerily reminds me of "sales pitch", the Philip K Dick story where advertisers hijack your thoughts while you're commuting: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_Pitch_(short_story)

Not quite the same thing, but related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n17B_uFF4cA

This reminds me of one particular TV set I was messing with recently. Pulling the HDMI cord on an input resulted in the screen showing static.

Had to think about it for a second, but the static had to have been simulated by a piece of code to pretend that the input had gone missing.

Apple had that feature, at least on my previous Air.

Wait, is that really deliberate for the DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter? I've always assumed that was some sort of serious hardware/software bug causing the coloured random noise.

Lots of discussion about this when JWZ noticed it on his TVs: http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/01/snow-crash-simulated/

Youtube does that if a video doesn't load right.

The digital TVs and monitors I've used would all show some variant of "No Signal. Check Signal Cable." in a little slowly-moving box that bounces around the screen. Perhaps some manufacturers thought that was not obvious enough to people accustomed to classic analogue TV.

i read this and I want a new car so I can hack the acceleration sounds from Elite: Dangerous into my car. That games sounds design is incredible, here is a quick clip featuring some space acceleration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqIVbT6v5j0

I want the Jetsons' car sound. My bother wants a Star Wars TIE fighter and my father in law would like the sound of a B-17, please.

I've been telling people I want the Jetsons sound ever since I got a Prius.

I can do without piping it into the cabin, though.

I've always wanted the hovercar sound from Blade Runner, but I think I've found a new favorite with the TIE fighter :)

It wouldn't sound so appealing to the driver without the Doppler effect applied.

Maybe combine with the sensors of a driverless car -- anytime some jerk is approaching from behind at a reckless speed, play the TIE fighter noise adjusted to the circumstances of his relative speed and approach vector. You'll hear the Doppler as he overtakes and then cuts you off. If you're going to pipe engine noise into the compartment, at least make it useful.

I personally like the sound of a 2-stroke diesel - one of the types of engines that died out due to their much higher emissions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkH9QRaQJM0

100 years from now cars will still make a vestigial sound that is simply taken for granted and not really considered until some wise-ass at a party starts in "Funny story..."

We will have to explain the origin of the sound coming out of our car speakers to our kids, like we have to explain the floppy disk icon for saving a file.

A friend's young daughter asked him why the phone made a "funny sound" when taking a picture. She's never encountered a film camera or heard a real shutter click before.

To be fair, someone who has a lot of experience with film cameras could legitimately ask the same question. Why the hell would a completely different technology ape the noises of a previous generation?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

I guess in this case (with sound) it would be called skeuophone.

It's also that some countries legally required digital cameras to make noises when taking photos, to make surreptitious photography impossible.

I have no problem with manufacturers including fake engine noise as a feature as long as it can be disabled by the customer.

Perhaps it should just be used when a pedestrian is near? It's bad enough worrying about cars that are making legal maneuvers, but when an electric car doesn't follow the rules, it's that much more dangerous.

I think you might misunderstand the nature of the artificial sounds mentioned in this article. It's not talking about electric cars making noise for the benefit of pedestrians (although that does get a cursory mention), it's talking about manufacturers of pumping artificial car noises into the cabins of cars like the Ford Mustang and the BMW M5 for the enjoyment of the occupants of the vehicle.

Electric cars do not pollute. We should force electric cars to emit some thick black smoke to ensure people do not get surprised!

I don't know in what world these regulators live in, but in my world 80% of pedestrians are walking listening to an ipod/iphone/iwhatever. We already live in a society where pedestrians do not hear cars.

But let's make sure cars remain a nuisance to anyone trying to sleep in a city!

They've got that covered: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2011/01/24/2_stat...

The cars don't pollute, but odds are that the electricity they run on came from burning coal, and lithium batteries aren't exactly environmentally friendly to manufacture or recycle. The rare elements required for the electric motors and batteries aren't earth-friendly to mine or refine, either.

But the car itself doesn't obviously emit any of this, so the public image it presents is great, hence their popularity. For me, wake me up when we have a diesel electric hybrid, since that's actually a very efficient tech which doesn't necessarily require any batteries and has been around for over 100 years (popular on ships / submarines / trains).

I don't disagree but I wasn't making a statement about the eco-friendlyness of electric cars, rather about a law defeating a technological improvement. Cars are by a large margin the largest source of nuisance in a city and for two reasons: noise and pollution. Electric cars are solving both.

Is that true? Tesla, for example, claims that their cars contain no rare earth elements. Lithium batteries are fairly benign in terms of the materials they use, and AC induction motors are not much more than clever arrangements of copper.

At least some of the remaining 20% are blind, and only have engine noise to work on when trying to work out if its safe for them to cross the road or not. I doubt the simulated engine noise has to be very loud to alert those people to the presence of a vehicle, but it does seem unreasonable to ask them to just take their chances, or listen out for the sound of tires rolling along tarmac.

There are many other dangers not making noise. Bikes for example. Blind or not, no one should rely on noise to decide whether it is safe to cross a street.

People got used to live with cars, it will be only a minuscule increment to get used to live with silent electric cars.

As someone who is totally blind and has over 20 years of experience crossing streets I am interested in what you feel the other realistic options for crossing streets with out listening to sound are? I have excepted the fact that crossing a street will never be completely safe. At least where I walk bikes are not common on the main streets and even if they were I'd much rather get hit by someone going 25 miles an hour on a bike then an electric car going 45 miles per hour.

My car has a "sound symposer" feature, and a 6-speed manual transmission. It has a tube coming off the engine, through a butterfly valve, then into the firewall of the car. The butterfly valve opens when the engine is under high load, so that the car is quiet normally, and loud if you get on it (inside).

I really enjoy this feature, and have actually redirected the tubes past the valve so that the sound is always on 100% of the time. This allows me to hear the engine RPMs while shifting, instead of monitoring the RPM gauge. It also reminds me to be more mindful of fuel economy because I can hear when I'm wasting gas.

I can understand a fully electronic sound being annoying - and the feature would annoy me on an electric car like a Tesla... But with the setup that mine has - I think people are just whining and that this article reeks of sensationalism. Also, it can be easily disabled in about five minutes by anybody who can watch some how-to videos on YouTube.

I hate the idea of a fake engine noise, but I drive a manual transmission and I know I use my ears a lot to know when to shift.

From what I've read, that wouldn't be relevant for an electric vehicle, since there is no transmission. Or that might only be for the Tesla.

Literally the entire reason for the transmission for a combustion engine is to make the relatively high minimum speed of an internal combustion work for lower road speeds, with the pleasant side effect of increasing torque at low speed.

Electric motors have no need for one, because they have both variable speeds and generally tremendous amounts of torque to start with.

Electric motors tend to have wide useable rpm ranges, but their efficiency varies across the range, so a transmission is still useful.

Scroll 2/3 of the way down this page to see a representative brushless DC motor performance curve, for example: http://www.johnsonelectric.com/en/resources-for-engineers/au...

AC induction motors (typically what's used in electric cars) have a pretty flat efficiency curve. For example: http://powerelectronics.com/motion-systems/motors-efficiency...

There would be some minor efficiency gains from having multiple gears, but it's probably small enough that it would be hard to overcome the extra losses from having a more complex transmission.

Note that technically electric cars do have a transmission. The motor wants to spin much faster than the tires, so you want a reduction gear to let them both live in the ranges where they're happy. It's a single-gear transmission, though, on every electric car I'm aware of.

This is a very good point. I do the same.

Me too, though I just bought a new (to me) 2007 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon. It's by far the newest, smoothest, quietest vehicle I've ever owned. So much so, it's actually taking me a long time to get used to when I need to change gears because I can't hear or feel what the engine is doing. Often I look at the tacho and am I bit surprised to see it's either revving way lower or higher than I was thinking. Being a 6-speed and geared very differently that other vehicles it's also tricking me up in terms of engine speed vs. road speed.

I drove my last 5-speed 2000 Jeep Wrangler from Alaska to Argentina, and I've owned a stack of stick-shift vehicles before, so it's not like I'm new to this.

I'm sure I'll get the hang of it, sooner or later.

There is some good discussion of synthetic car noises in Norman's "Design of everyday things". Sound is a hard to use interface that could still offer great usability advances if we work out to harness it properly.

I see people asking "why not rely on the horn to alert pedestrians". The horn is the equivalent of shouting "oi" but engine sound is hugely rich source of information. We get: speed, direction, distance, acceleration, attitude (e.g. distinguish aggressive acceleration, panicked deceleration) and type of car (e.g. racer vs. town-car).

Unlike a horn, we get this information at the times a horn would not be used i.e. the driver has not seen us and about to mow us down. Synthetic car noise must alert, orient but not annoy. Norman said the current United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration spec for synthetic car noise is 250 pages long.

Weird. I would prefer the engine to be as quiet as possible. The proof of performance is in how the thing drives, not how it sounds. Tweaking the exhaust pipe on a car like the Mustang makes sense, but piping sound in through the speakers? As long as I can turn it off permanently.

Different people have different preferences, and some sounds provoke an emotional response in some people. Not that weird.

I don't know about other communities, but Formula 1 fans go and watch races because of sounds. The new rules in 2014 which introduced the v6 hybrid doesn't have a very loud sound and you can see the media reaction to it. Old cars used to have a v8 engine. Revs limiting is also one of the reason of low sound in 2014.

If you want an comparision between the old sound and new sound, see the below mentioned youtube video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jS4Dh_EAfJI

News: http://www.theguardian.com/sport/blog/2014/mar/25/bernie-ecc...

Confession: I am a Luxury Ricer.

When I bought my now 11-year-old Lexus, I was amazed by two aspects: how sporty and well controlled it was [for a luxury car], and how silent it was. It was literally more quiet than a Prius and it had an inline six.

And I hated it.

After a few months of hitting the gas and hearing nothing, I opened up the hood and ripped the tiny ram-air front inlet off the air intake. I also took apart the air box and gutted the parts that didn't affect the air filter. The result was a tiny but definitely noticeable engine roar when high-revving. It finally sounded about as mean as a Toyota Corolla.

They can pry my engine noise from my cold, dead, ricer hands.

Priuses aren't really very quiet (at least on the inside) unless you're cruising at <60MPH or so, or decelerating. The engine gets pretty noisy when accelerating at any rate that isn't painfully slow, and the power output needed merely to maintain higher highway speeds gets pretty noisy.

Noise is actually one of the big reasons I'm looking forward to switching from a Prius to a pure electric.

Noise is just wasted energy that could be doing useful work unless, of course, you actually want the noise (like in a musical instrument). This is a really weird trend.

There will be a set of circumstances where you will be resorting to beeps to alert pedestrians without engine noise.

Time spent to contemplate whether to beep or not constantly may also be wasted time.

Long before everyone has driverless cars—and not long after cars are silent enough for this sort of thing to matter—we'll have cars that are at least smart enough to know when there are pedestrians nearby and beep at them. (Or possibly even only play engine noise when approaching them.)

The power in noise is actually fairly low. Like single digit watts low, for deafening noise.

You are only looking at the energy in the noise itself. But to make that noise there is a ton of wasted energy in vibration, friction from gears, etc.

Noise is a symptom of "slop" in an engine. It might be unavoidable, but it's still a symptom of wasted energy.

Oh, definitely. Noise is often a symptom of wasted energy in a mechanical process.

And even producing noise with a speaker is rather inefficient. You need hundreds of Watt input for single digit Watt output in the interesting frequencies.

Yeah, fuck anyone else not in a car.

The only reason these sounds are being added to cars is because some people want the noise. Some for safety reasons, some for aesthetic reasons. In the latter case, it's no different than music.

>Federal safety officials expect to finalize rules later this year requiring all hybrid and electric cars to play fake engine sounds to alert passersby, a change that experts estimate could prevent thousands of pedestrian and cyclist injuries.

Yeah, because those pedestrian and cyclists should be responsible for staying out of the way of badly driven cars... Just think how safe things would be if we cranked things up so loud that drivers could hear other cars.

The worst part about that is that car noise is an actual ecological and "quality of life" threat, combated in many places by noise walls built around roads. Forcing cars to be loud is the worst possible decision that could be made.

The flip side is that modern cars can accelerate from the 5kph that they exit their driveway at to 50kph with no noticeable noise.

I have almost been run over this way. Look to the left, no cars on the road, look to the right, no cars, look back to the left JESUS CHRIST.

Hopefully automatic pedestrian detection will become standard in the next few years, but in the mean time I need to be able to hear your high speed death-ram when I'm not facing it.

Perfectly happy for it to be something other than simulated engine noise, but I need an audible cue.

I'm hard of hearing, and to first order I cannot ever hold a conversation in public in a city: outside it's cars, inside it's crowds and music. Once upon a time I looked forward to electric cars taking over; now I expect this regulation to persist long after there are good other solutions for safety.

Also, companies will try to differentiate their brand using this fake sound. So we will go from a mostly-bassy-white-but-still-annoying ICE noise to very specific and recognizable frequencies and tones that will make a misophonia sufferer want to kill themself.

You make it sound like it's only car drivers that ignore road rules.

Only someone who strongly defined themselves by their method of transport would interpret the statement like that.

I take it you've never been driving along and had a pedestrian absent-mindedly step into the road in front of you. That's the kind of thing that engine noise helps avoid. Read some of the other comments on this page.

For what it's worth, most of my travel is on trams - not foot, cycle, or car. Thanks for the patronising comment, though.

The sudden change of subject suggests that the patronizing comment was appropriate...

We are not dissing your tribe... You don't have to be defensive...

What tribe do you think I belong to? I was pointing out that anyone can be negligent.

And seriously: "Yeah, I was being patronising, but don't be defensive about it"? If you can't handle being called on your own behaviour, don't do it to others.

On the Renault Clio, you can already choose the kind of engine noise you want from a menu.

They could monetize that with microtransactions. 99c to download and install "1968 Ferrari Dino" or "Anakin's Podracer".

Sebulba for the whales, 100€

My initial thought was: I wouldn't want any 'fake' noise, potentially hiding information in the (softer) real noise.

But what if the noise is dynamically synthesized based on lots of info from the vehicle – perhaps not just its real noise/RPMs, but other qualities usually not usually sensed. Temperature and vibrations across multiple sampling-locations? Computed fuel-economy? Others?

Maybe it's a good aural channel for real info!

Great point

This reminds me of Kornbluth's story 'The Marching Morons' where cars are made noisy but slow so the morons will be stimulated but safe.

When I first drove my 2012 VW Golf R, I was startled by how rumbly the engine sounded. Found out the sound was produced by a device called the soundaktor that was attached to the windshield frame. The device would send low-frequency vibrations to the windshield as needed to "enhance" the engine sound.

While maybe it's silly to do it electronically, thousands of people switch out the exhausts on their cars/motorcycles not often for increases in performance... but to have a different sound.

Doing it electronically is new, but the concept of wanting a more 'powerful' sounding engine isn't.

That's still derided by enthusiasts when it's taken to extremes, for instance a loud exhaust on an economy car fools no-one and will draw negative attention from most people. But below trying-too-hard territory, it is an authentic-feeling unleashing of your vehicle's inner beast, which is something the sound effects system will never be.

Fake engine noise would be nice. We drive in historical St. Augustine Fl. That is, for those who don't know, the oldest city in the US. As such it was built with extremely narrow streets.

My hybrid silently rolls down the back alleys unnoticed by pedestrians. I've had to sit for 10 minutes because people would walk out in front of my car. Women with strollers. Old people talking.

I've watched traditional cars. They have far less problem. There is a sense that hearing an engine means that someone wants out.

I don't mind channeling the REAL engine noise into the car. Like the article said, it can be preferable to the sound of bumps in the road or whining of wind. And for car enthusiasts who actually work on their own cars, sound is a key part of detecting and diagnosing issues with the car.

But they need to cut it out with the fake noise. That's just glamor and it's unnecessary. The only exception I would support is for electric cars, for the purpose of pedestrian safety.

My first reaction was that it's stupid and pointless.

But my second reaction is that it's a clever culture hack that allows more efficient engines to make their way into typical "car lover" cars--so ultimately a good thing all around. Drivers get the sound they want, with better gas mileage, and the rest of us get cars that are quieter on the outside and produce less pollution. All enabled by a bit of digital audio.

I think all of this is normal. Sound is also an interface, for it connects one world to another. As in software, if you change drastically any interface, the users will not like at the first. That's why great changes needs to be done in small portions. With the past of years, these fake sounds can disappear of the industry, after the users get used to electric cars.

Wow, so I guess the movie "The Dilemma" was actually based on a true story. They do spend time optimizing engine noise!

I have a Nissan Leaf so yes, there is no fake engine sound, only a sound in front at low speed to warn pedestrians.

Not only I would not want a fake engine sound but I would be willing to pay more to have my car sound proof, with insulation or something, it would be quieter, colder in the summer and warmer in the winter.

We should really be taking this opportunity to make all cars sound like the cars on the Jetsons.

"Federal safety officials expect to finalize rules later this year requiring all hybrid and electric cars to play fake engine sounds to alert passersby, a change that experts estimate could prevent thousands of pedestrian and cyclist injuries."

My guess is that the main force behind this law is Big Oil using their lobbyists to slow the adoption of electric vehicles. If they were really concerned about pedestrians being hit by cars it would be illegal to wear headphones while walking.

Instead of adding noise, which we already have too much of (I can hear cars on roads a mile away from my house) how about they require cars to send out a signal that an inexpensive device can pick up and thus locate the car. That way any pedestrian can actually see where all the cars are around them. I bet that kind of proactive action would have much better results then depending on people's inadvertent attention to background noise.

Clearly a first world problem. I especially like the "outrageous" language in the article: "built an lies", as if it was a major drama, ... honestly, who cares? ... But then I again, I do not even care to own a car.

The phrase "the rise of" is really being abused these days.

Yet another example of skeuomorphism...

Heinlein predicted this in The Cat Who Walks Through Walls

Car ring-tones! yay! I want crazy frog on my tesla.

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