This just in for all you hybrid car fans: “House passes legislation to make hybrids louder.”
If any of you are familiar with the TV series, “The Office,” (the American version), you’ll remember an episode which highlights the fact that at low speeds, a hybrid vehicle is virtually silent. It has something to do with the efficiencies of an electric engine and only until you reach speeds of 20-30 mph does the internal combustion engine begin operating. I guess blind pedestrians have used the small explosions of combusting fuel as a tell-tale sign of an approaching car and are utterly defenseless against a slow-moving Hybrid. Fortunately, Congress has, in its infinite wisdom, granted auto regulators the authority to set “minimum sound levels” to protect our blind citizens from impending doom. This regulation seems to ignore any responsibility of the driver to pay attention while at the wheel, and it gives the impression that the blind are running helter-skelter across our community roadways. I don’t see how adding sound really helps - if anything, having sounds of various levels will make it that much harder for the blind to know what’s coming at them (consider that the doppler affect distorts the sound to begin with, and a loud vehicle will sound the same as a quiet car at vastly different distances to the observer).
As for the majority of us, adding “sounds” to hybrids will just be one more thing perspective buyers have to pay for. I’ll only be happy if they have a “TIE fighter” sound option.
Weren’t companies doing this voluntarily already? It’s not really a great idea to trivilize how the transition to electric vehicles might impact the blind. The problem is a real one, as the blind do use sound to help them navigate the world.
However as always, the question falls back to how to fix the problem. Through voluntary concern, or through force?
Oh, and the doppler effect doesn’t affect the sound intensity, merely it’s frequency. Science!
It’s not really a great idea to trivialize how the transition to electric vehicles might impact the blind. The problem is a real one, as the blind do use sound to help them navigate the world.
That’s a great point that I should have mentioned. I don’t want to trivialize the matter for the blind, but I do want to say that leaving this responsibility to a handful of government auto regulators is perhaps the single worst way to do this.
Oh, and the doppler effect doesn’t affect the sound intensity, merely it’s frequency. Science!
That’s true. Correct me if I’m wrong, but a loud car and quiet car will indeed sound the same at different distances will it not? And since the doppler affect changes depending on the speed of the vehicle, would you agree that it makes it a poor indicator for the relative distance separating you from an approaching vehicle?
@ scineram - I have a lot of catching up to do on Netflix, I guess!
That’s true. Correct me if I’m wrong, but a loud car and quiet car will indeed sound the same at different distances will it not? And since the doppler affect changes depending on the speed of the vehicle, would you agree that it makes it a poor indicator for the relative distance separating you from an approaching vehicle?
Humans don’t only percieve the distance to a sound’s source by intensity and frequency alone. We have two ears, which provide stereo sound. Much like having two eyes allows us to percieve the world in 3 dimensions. This really is the key to determining the distance of a vehicle. While sight is obviously the best of the 5 senses, the blind don’t have that, and sound is by far the next best option. I don’t reccommend trying to determine whether it’s safe to cross the street using your sense of taste! Short of a device that simulates sight or transfers visual information into other senses, sound is the best thing they’ve got.
As to how various cars would sound at distance, generally, a loud car will annouce itself sooner, the quiet one later, regardless of speed. Sound has mutliple properties. The ones relevent here are frequency and intensity. Frequency determines the pitch, Intensity the “loudness”. The doppler effect only affects pitch, as it’s the movement ove the object generating the sound that alters the frequency relative to the observer. Now this is confounded a bit in that some frequencies can better maintain thier intensity as they move through the air. However, if you take two cars a “loud” car and a “quiet” car, given that they both produce the same frequency, the “loud” one will always annouce itself first, as it’s greater initial intensity of sound will be able to travel through the air father before dissipating to the point where it’s inaudible.
I’ll qualify this by saying this is only really true of traffic moving at “norma” speeds. If you’re talking about stuff that’s moving much closer to the speed of sound, that makes a difference. But we’re talking about cars going somewhere around 15-45 mph.
Question: since governments all over the world are generously financing electric vehicles, what do they plan to do about those? Fit giant loudspeakers to warn pedestrians by blasting The Ride of Valkyrie?
Personally I think this is a bit of legislation aimed at helping out GM (Government Motors, previously known as General Motors). Their present Volt hybrid has been busted open by most car magazines. Among the various faults is the fact that’s much noisier and hence less comfortable than the Toyota Prius and the Honda Insight. Perhaps by forcing the Japanese to make their cars worse they think, as only politicians can think, that Toyota’s and Honda’s will instantly become every bit as bad as the Volt and people will rush out to buy the much more expensive (a basic Volt is ten grands more expensive than a basic Prius) out of sheer patriotism.
Don’t be surprised: FIAT (italian auto maker) has been doing it for decades. Laws have been tailor made on their needs to help them sell a handful of extra cars each year. I suspect the cost of coming up and implementing the laws has been far superior to any economic benefit for the parties involved. But again do we look up to the State as a model of efficiency?