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Nissan Gives Electric Cars Blade Runner Audio Effect
mateuscb writes "A campaign backed by automakers and some lawmakers to make electric or hybrid cars noisier in a bid to increase safety for pedestrians and cyclists has taken a strange, Blade Runner-type twist. Nissan sound engineers have announced that the Leaf electric car set for release next year will emit a 'beautiful and futuristic' noise similar to the sound of flying cars — or 'spinners' — that buzz around 2019 Los Angeles in Ridley Scott's dystopian thriller based on a Philip K. Dick science fiction novel."
...one of the nice things about electric cars is that they're so quiet. Can you turn the sound off?
The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources. - Albert Einstein
They should make some kind of noise that sounds significantly different when its coming towards you compared with going away from you, just like how an ambulance or police siren is.
Just put a card in the spokes. Yea, it's nerdy, but so is the car.
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20090918/NISSAN_EV6.jpg
Only in your dreams.
But are they really your dreams?
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I would want that sound that the USS Enterprise makes as it whizzes through space...
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
I want my car to sound like the flying cars from The Jetsons. Then I can at least pretend that I got the future I was promised as a child.
In response, Mazda has announced that their cars will play an endless loop of a 6 year old saying "zoom-zoom!"
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
From the article ~ "Some reports suggest that in the future, car owners will download a sound for their car the way many consumers buy ring tones for their cellphones."
Oh crap, now we have to listen to cars playing crappy tunes on bad speakers all the time. Can't their be a law against this proposed. I think a few dead pedestrians is worth the loss of the noise pollution.
Yay! Pretty soon we'll be able to buy ringtones for our cars! Now kids won't have to go deaf turning their music up loud enough that everyone around can hear it. The Hip-hop ring tones will play on an outside speaker! Hooray.
Sean
Great...
What's next? A ringtone for your car?
Get your ass to Mars.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Funny world we live in. Car noise became so ubiquitous, we "need" them.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
An example of the sound is apparently this one. Not sure tho', found on an another site.
They actually bother to look, unlike many pedestrians who listen for traffic. Cyclists have to brake sharp or take evasive action to avoid these clowns.
I would imagine they're normally responsible for minimizing road noise, engine noise heard inside the cabin, making the stereo sound good in the aurally hostile environment that is an automobile, etc.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Please not ringtone cars. Please please please. It's ten years into the future and I can't stand it already.
Will code a sig generator for food
But one of the nice things about electric cars is that they're so quiet. Can you turn the sound off?
If it can't be turned off, then I, for one, won't be buying one. Modern life is noisy enough as it is.
I want mine to make the sound of a Bell HU-1 ...with optional Wagner overlay.
No sig today...
Now I want the Windows 95 TADA noise when my airbags are deployed. I love for my cars to have a sense of sarcasm.
This signature serves no purpose other than to help you see which posts were made by me.
Will this result in a new market where you can D/L different sounds for your car? Gives rice car a new meaning. Drive downtown late friday night with a honda that sounds like a Murcielago 660 and see people look for the Ghost Car.
I think i like this idea. I think the most popular sound will be "fart".
HTTP/1.1 400
...why a fart noise when you could play the Brown Noise?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
At least 75% of the pedestrians don't look *either* way.
The mouth breathers are of the belief that 8 oz of striping paint will stop 3 tons of Detroit steel.
TFA links to the National Federation for the Blind's article about this topic. Here's the most relevant snippet: >> While there are no national data on pedestrian injuries or deaths related to low-noise cars... Ok - guys: get some data! This is just plain ridiculous to pass a law based on a mere assumption that quiet cars might cause a problem. If someone can prove that this is a plague upon the nation - great; pass the law. But otherwise this is a fake problem. I've owned a civic hybrid and a prius. Neither were really noticeably quieter (even when the prius was operating electric only) than your typical accord / camry. Does anyone have any data at all anywhere showing the increased incident rate for quiet cars? I'd love to see it, but I'm pretty sure it's not there.
I created this account just so I could comment on this story
My friend owns a Prius, and if it's moving at a fairly low speed you won't hear it at all.
All you hear are the horrifying screams of the pedestrians being mowed down at 3 mph.
They smell like flying cars, they sound like flying cars, they look like flying cars, they probably even taste like flying cars, but they CANNOT give us a . . .damned . . . FLYING . . . CAR !?
Table-ized A.I.
Mine will chant "kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit"
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
I always assumed there'd be other sources of noise, e.g. the tires - but that thing can be eerily quiet.
So can any modern, well-built small car from 100 feet away when travelling less than 12 mph.
Really, the noise is basically useless if you are less than about 40 feet away, as you probably won't be able to avoid the car by noise alone with less than 2 seconds notice. And, from 100 feet away, unless you are gliding in neutral and revving the engine, a car moving 12mph is basically silent.
Try it sometime...stand with your back to a car that starts 200 feet from you in a normally noisy parking lot, have it move towards you at 10-15mph, and then raise your hand when you identify the car by sound alone. I'll bet you identify a lot of other cars instead of the one heading towards you.
Why not make cars transmit a signal that can be picked up by nearby personal receivers for blind people? It'd eliminate noise pollution and everyone else could just look.
Presumably their normal work is making cars *quieter*, since that's what normal people want. (At least, making the interiors quieter.) I'm guessing none of them were hired with the job description: "make car noisier."
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Oh gawd, I can just hear the 16yr olds with their "Crazy Frog" sounding cars now.....arggh
I'll just have it emit whatever's playing on my stereo.
ASCAP or another major performance rights organization would bust a CAP in your AS for that. The music on your stereo probably isn't licensed for an intentional public performance.
Like ringtones.
I mean, if Nissan dosn't catch a clue about this, it'll be hacked anyway.
Have gnu, will travel.
If the car itself makes an annoying noise, can anyone image how awful the car alarm is gonna be?
Your eyes aren't everything - I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm much faster to react to something I hear over something I see.
I live in a fairly large city in the northeast US. I walk a lot, but not like true urban walking - it's a mile and a half to the train station, and I walk it twice a day outside of light groceries and the like. I grew up walking in NYC and its suburbs, and I've been lucky enough to never actually need a driver's license. My feet do me just fine for most things.
So believe me when I say that the idea of a truly silent car terrifies me. I look both ways when I cross the street, I don't habitually jaywalk, I follow street signs and stay on the curb until the light changes, but if all that fails or if a driver isn't paying the same kind of attention I am to the road (he has a steel cage around him; I don't) I rely on my ears. I've had my ass saved on more than one occasion by hearing a car swinging around a corner towards me that I couldn't see yet.
There are a lot of stupid drivers on the road. There are also a lot of careless or over-confident pedestrians. But I can't see this as a bad thing - my eyes might keep me from walking out into the middle of traffic, but my ears are what get me to step back quickly onto the curb because somebody in a car isn't being careful.
As someone who lives in Nepal, and drives a motorbike in India, the things drivers shed to pedestrians is not wanted. Like the habit of backing up and running you over again if hit, to avoid paying the family of the squashed pedestrian any compensation. Please tell drivers in the Bihar that this is not acceptable, and the practice should be stopped immediately.
As far as ringtones for my next electric vehicle (my first was a Chinese motorbike), I will install the Tata Truck ringtone , which sounds like any other on the road. It's the one noise that instills fear in all creatures near the highway. Sounding like a cylon raider will do nothing to keep peds safe here.
I think therefore I can't be ~TTNH
Electric cars should have the noise of cars.
I want Bill Cosby's gocart sounds.
"I've... driven things you people wouldn't believe. Set Priuses on fire off the corner of Orion Street. I watched Smart cars sputter in the dark near the Tenhauser Tunnel. All those... models will be lost in time, like... tears in the rain."
Pedestrians must have a sense of responsibility. All road users should do. As a cyclist, I can tell you I am very passionate in my belief that car drivers also should have a sense of responsibility and alas a small minority do not, and drive like idiots (this is also true of cyclists).
If a person weighing 150lbs* bumps into me, I am happy enough to accept a spoken apology. Drivers of a ton of steel must take much more responsibility for their action as their mistakes KILL. I can tell you that a minority do not. When I lived in London I'd expect one near miss a week (as in possible hospitalisation) cycling to work and back in the city centre. Drivers turning without indicating and forcing me to hit the brakes/jump onto the pavement and possibly endanger pedestrians, drivers opening their car doors into the traffic a couple of metres ahead of me without checking for traffic, parked cars pulling out without checking their mirrors. Nearly been hit by them all.
You are very right, people should behave responsibly on the road, and those people driving larger vehicles definitely must be extra careful.
* As an aside my friend, lighten up and love yourself a bit more. "150 fleshbag" - what a terrible expression! Human bodies are fine engineering and beautiful things. Love yourself a little more. Get out and do some walking, cycle, rock climb, enjoy that body! It's what you've got to live in so love it, enjoy it, use it to the limit, don't despite it :-)
The sound should be as un-musical and as noiselike as possible. White noise and impulses are much easier to localize. It is almost impossible to identify the direction from which a narrowband signal is coming.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdmPouNLTlU
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Try being blind and then guessing when it's safe to cross the road...
I've read the articles where the blind people are freaked out by hybrid cars that they can't hear (when the car pulls away from a stop, for example). We can all understand why we want blind people to know there is a moving vehicle near them.
The thing is, simple economics dictates that it would make far more sense to equip the blind people with car proximity sensors of some kind, rather than make every car noisy.
There are far fewer blind people than cars. We can reasonably assume that in the future there will be many more hybrid or electric cars which produce little to no sound at low speeds.
Imagine the benefit of having areas free from engine noise - why artificially make every car noisy just for the safety of a very small portion of the population who can't see them?
It'd be easy enough to equip every car with something that produces ultrasonic sound or low power radio waves, and give blind people a device they can wear that will detect the car proximity signal and indicate to the blind person (perhaps by vibration) where nearby cars are.
Putting moderation advice in your