Over-regulation. EU mandates Electric Vehicles must make noise

[glend (Glen)]

It seems from today Electric Vehicles being launched in the EU must make noise. Seriously, they seem to be worried about the walking phone gazers wandering out in front of a nearly silent EV.

https://www.drive.com.au/news/europe...ampaign=tile-3

I find this very funny. No mention of electric bikes, scooters, etc. Or the many EV already on the road there.

Perhaps Tesla can download a fart sound generator into their vehicles. Imagine the selection of sound effects, a little Nissan Leaf decelerating to the sound of a Ferrari V12 downshifting broadcast through a set of forward facing subwoofers.

[raymo]

Glen, being as manually operated scooters and bikes are already virtually silent, what artificial noise would you endow electric ones with?
raymo

[AndyG (Andy)]

I believe this has already happened in other jurisdictions previously. My father in law in Japan once had a Mitsubishi iMiev EV, as a work car. The thing was ghostly quiet. One could not hear this car over the wind rushing past your ears, not to mention in the presence of any other traffic.

As much as I believe phone zombies should succumb to the Darwin awards, the smaller EVs at least are a hazard to everyone.

It would be neat if the vehicle sound could be uploaded, or at least chosen from a preset list.

I can't decide whether I'd subscribe to a TIE fighter roar, or a screaming 2stroke dirtbike hittin' 'band.

That said, with such freedom, I could envisage some poor outcomes by others. Perhaps a constant "Rodney Rude" cackle, or that horrid laugh from "The Nanny" (apologies for these bottom-of-the-barrel examples).

[glend (Glen)]

Originally Posted by raymo

Glen, being as manually operated scooters and bikes are already virtually silent, what artificial noise would you endow electric ones with?
raymo

Raymo, I actually own an electric mountain bike (a Leitner CrossX), which I was riding today. It is quiet, when coasting or braking, but it, like most EVs, makes some noise under power. I believe the ones with regenerative braking capability do have some deceleration noise but I doubt it is sufficient to disturb the phone zombies. You can now buy more serious electric motorcycle type bikes, which are road registerable in Australia, like the Sur Ron XR:

https://voltbike.com.au/product/sur-...ts-road-legal/

And there are some very serious road machines like the Harley Davidson Livewire about to hit the market:

https://www.harley-davidson.com/au/e...06pBRWO8VY2.97

So yeah, this maybe something that is going to emerge as an issue here. A simple single bell, as typical on push bikes, is not going to seem very serious on a Harley.

There are no ADRs that currently apply within Australia, so I imagine the EU regulation may get picked up here eventually.
A coasting and braking noise maker would be pretty easy to fit to existing pedal assist and hand throttle electric bikes, but how do you enforce it. Seriously it would be removed pretty quickly by a buyer. How do you require retrospective fitting on existing ebikes, which do not require registration? And an electric bike, travelling at its Australian legal speed of 25kmph, can still hit and kill someone if they walk in front of it, just as a push bike could.
And there are a fair number of Utube videos on how to hack ebike controllers to increase speed capability.

So i don't know Ray, but my mine is drawn back to the old playing card in the spokes trick that we used as kids, to make our old push bikes sound like dirt bikes.

[gary]

The Red Flag Law of 1865 in the U.K required self-propelled vehicles to be
led by a pedestrian walking at least 60 yards in front of the vehicle
and for them to be waving a red flag or carrying a lantern to warn
bystanders of the vehicle's approach.

The Red Flag Law was repealed in 1896.

[lazjen (Chris)]

Ok, I hope they also put a maximum noise level output as well - and enforce it. I can't wait until we get rid of non-electric motorbikes - the noise they make is terrible.

If you read the article it mentions the noise is also for the blind as well, so it's perfectly reasonable to have. I wonder if silent vehicles increase the impacts with wildlife as well? Maybe the noise might help there too?

[luka]

Glen, have a look at this Wikipedia article. There are several studies which show increased number of accidents when comparing quiet hybrid cars to "normal" cars with internal combustion engine. As the increase in accidents only happen at low speeds (<20km) the regulation to make noise also only applies to such speeds. I would call it common sense and not an over-regulation.

Also it is worth mentioning that Japan had such regulation since 2010 and US brought one last year (to start in September 2020).

Go for a walk at your shopping centre car park and pay attention. If the car next to you has its engine off most of us will not even bother looking to see if it will start reversing into us. It is not something we would expect. But if you can hear the car running I bet nobody would just blindly step behind it.

edit: This was a reply to your post which disappeared while I was typing???
An EV with other traffic is a bad argument and will work only if there is a continuous flow of cars on the street. Which in reality never happens. And what will happen when we have more EV cars on our streets, when the old noisy cars become a minority?

[SimmoW (SIMON)]

I suppose its expected that such a visually oriented forum will show ignorance towards the blind and vision impaired perspective. It's an excellent regulation

[glend (Glen)]

Originally Posted by SimmoW

I suppose its expected that such a visually oriented forum will show ignorance towards the blind and vision impaired perspective. It's an excellent regulation

Oh come on. As some members know, I am vision impaired myself, with bad macular degeneration in my right eye. I will lose the remaining discrimination completely in a couple of years. I would be the last person to suggest vision impaired people should not be considered. It just seems to me that the knee jerk reaction is to regulate more aspects of our lives. There are other potential solutions.:
What if the pedestrian is deaf? What do you want to regulate for that scenario, perhaps a rotating beacon on top of every vehicle.
Yesterday there was a story about the real time tracking of every single vehicle, or phone, using Google location services, with the expected outcome being you would be alerted about a car turning ahead of you across your path before you arrive, or a pedestrian crossing the road, etc. My point being technology will rapidly make "noise makers" obsolete, like the guy holding a red flag walking in front of early vehicles.

And what about car drivers responsibility? Perhaps those low speed pedestrian impacts would drop considerably if car drivers were not looking at their phones, or Android Car screens at the time.

[bojan]

It's not abpout regulation per se.. it's about how to collect more money from fines.

[The_bluester (Paul)]

I think that EVs needing to make some sort of noise is really not a bad idea as such. Pedestrians are now so commonly buried in their phones that a near silent car is a lot more deadly than it used to be.

My last work car was very quiet at idle, so quiet that one of my workmates thought at one stage that it was a hybrid rolling along at walking pace on electric power, many people tried to step in front of it in the city while I had that. A different era and no smart phones but I don’t recall anyone stepping in front of my slightly anti socially noisy Z car in the decade or so that I had it.

It was interesting listening this morning with a public transport bloke on the radio talking about the latest tram to “other” collisions, apparently a pretty large number of pedestrian/tram impacts this year are people e actually walking in to the side of a tram, rather than in front of one. That has to say chronic “attention on the phoneitis”

Killing a pedestrian who walked into and went under the side of my car because they were too engrossed in Netflix to look where they were walking might not be my fault, but it would not make me feel any better about it and they would be just as dead.

[xelasnave]

Place long knives on cars so pedestrians if hit dont suffer unnecessarily.
They respond to concerns and so if for no other reason doing something...anything...can only be a good thing. As to what sound that is difficult...we dont want to glorify noisy gas guzzlers. ..what about horsey sounds. ..and guide dogs probably need to be educated...I best go to Brussles and consult advise and be interested.
Alex

[cometcatcher (Kevin)]

I really wish this forum had the "like" button sometimes for some of these posts.

[GrahamL]

What if the pedestrian is deaf?

Being mostly deaf I find most all small cars are silent when alone on any type of road , carparks are definately interesting i learnt to always look for the reversing lights in time .

[Oddity (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by glend

What if the pedestrian is deaf? What do you want to regulate for that scenario, perhaps a rotating beacon on top of every vehicle.

That's not a particularly apt comparison. If you are deaf you can at least still use your sense of vision when crossing the road, to look whether there is a car coming.

If you are blind and can only ever hear the faint wheel noise of an EV on quiet streets... well, a much more apt comparison would be if someone made a car that was 90% invisible. Sort of a shimmer that you could only see in direct light. For such a cloaked vehicle, on a rainy day, a deaf person crossing the road would have absolutely no way of knowing that they are stepping into certain doom.

And yes, I would indeed expect regulation to require cars that are made of some material with intrinsic cloaking technology to have a big rotating beacon on top!

[Camelopardalis (Dunk)]

The question is, does the car really make any noise if there is nobody around to hear it?

[RB (Andrew)]

Originally Posted by Camelopardalis

The question is, does the car really make any noise if there is nobody around to hear it?

You will only know the answer to that in the forest.

[astroturf (Bryan)]

when we were kids we used to fasten a piece of cardboard to the forks of our bikes with a bulldog clip
the cardboard would make a "cool" sound as it flicked over the spokes

I can feel a manufacturing opportunity coming up

[Steffen]

Originally Posted by luka

As the increase in accidents only happen at low speeds (<20km) the regulation to make noise also only applies to such speeds.

The things is, modern petrol cars can also be virtually silent at those speeds. As a pedestrian, you are more likely to hear the noise of their tyres grinding on asphalt, or the sounds from the car stereo.

[LewisM]

Here in Canberra upon the launch of the (repeatedly delayed ad-nauseum ad infinitum) Light Rail (aka Trams everywhere else), there was a public safety campaign...after one guy walked in front of one while wearing headphones and staring intently at his phone.

I mean a BIG RED Tram. Hello? What, do we need to paint them a brighter red? Ring the bloody bell and blare the horn every 5 seconds for the ninnies? (like how in the USA, the trains CONTINUALLY blare their horns)

Having driven a Prius, and having nearly collected perhaps 3 scalps with it, I can attest to not only how silent they are in electric mode (under 40km/h), but also how idiotic people can be. Peripheral vision and spatial awareness of house bricks - and these people were not elderly.