Listen to this PodcastMore 60-Second Earth
[Sound clip] That's the future sound filling city streets. If President Obama has his way there will be one million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. This week the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration started a process to determine what should be done to make it easier for pedestrians and others who share the road to detect these quiet cars.
[clip 1] That electronic [sound clip] is one of several alternatives if the NHTSA decides to require these cars to add sounds. Here's another [sound clip].
The goal is to give an audio cue, not unlike the beeping associated with the backing up of large trucks. Why? Well, a study led by psychologist Lawrence Rosenblum of the University of California, Riverside, found that blindfolded test subjects could hear an internal combustion engine 36 feet away but didn't hear a hybrid until it was a mere 11 feet away.
That left scant few seconds to react before the hybrid reached them. And that's not safe. Which is why the electric or hybrid cars of the future may sound so, well, futuristic.—David Biello
[The above text is an exact transcript of this podcast.]
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9 Comments
Add CommentNo, not this again. No. I don't want my car buzzing everywhere and neither does anyone else.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGet ford to make them, then we will all hear then coming
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this25feet, that will give us oooh all of an extra half a second to rect to a car doing 30mph, and that will allow us to make it safe? I dont see what we could possibly do in half a second if we are crossing the road and hear a car coming its not even enough time to react let alone actually move.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThank God for the peace and quiet of the electric car, and thank God that humans and seeing-eye dogs can be retrained to look both ways before they cross the road...depend on your eyes - not your ears. Put a dog whistle on the front of the car that will alert the dog to alert the blind person of oncoming traffic; which the dog should already be trained to do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTaking ten years to figure out what sound to put on an electric car is another stall tactic...probably from GM. There is already supercharge batteries ready for mass production that will eliminate the so called "distance worry". We don't want or need sound makers on our electric cars, we are not children and we are not stupid. "Tassinari" is right; half a second will make no difference at all when someone blunders out into traffic without first looking to see if there is any traffic coming.
Instead whining about our electric cars not being noisy enough, we should be doing what Canada is now doing and installing supercharge stations and battery reload stations along all our highways. If we start installing those supercharge stations and battery reload stations now, we can be ready for those million electric cars that will be coming on the road by 2014. Get with it America and stop whining and dragging your heels and making up excuses.
Making electric cars artificially more noisy is a terrible idea... I know that lots of people out there want to wrap everyone in bubble wrap in the off chance a stray wind might blow an elephant into them... yes that would indeed be tragic....
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSomehow I doubt that everyone in the US will start wearing blindfolds on a daily basis, and those who are blind are hopefully not relying solely on their hearing when they step out into traffic...
This mentality of overprotecting everyone because we can find or imagine a scenario where a small group out of 275 million people might get themselves hurt... it is just gotten out of hand.
I want my car to sound like a Star Wars T-Fighter! Or a galloping horse! Or the sound of the the billion-dollar man running, or or or... The sound of a Ferrari F50!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOr can I change it? Download a new sound for my car??? cool!!!
I believe there's already a noisemakers in most automobiles. I understand that in common parlance it is referred to as a 'horn.'
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGarbage being forced on us by the ICE manufacturers. How far away we can hear something is highly dependent on the ambient noise level. Besides, there are already many very quiet cars out there which have not been causing any problems. Once we get rid of the noisiest cars and trucks, hearing the electric cars coming will not be a problem.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo matter what president obama wants ,the market will
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisdetermine how many and when these cars will be on our
highway. Obamas record of picking winning technologies
leaves a lot to be desired. Hahahahhaha. Thankfully congress makes the laws and not this Boob.