Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by psmithsfhn 1970 days ago
better, why do they still make car horns?
3 comments

To alert other people about your presence.

What would you do if a car was reversing and it looked highly probably they are going to hit you? Or when driving round blind bends on single track roads?

It has very valid use cases, it just happens to be abused by idiots quite often

I think it's actually illegal not to have an operational horn. Sound travels faster than cars so it's a great mechanism to communicate presence during an emergency.
Ah.. so the real question is, why do they still make idiots?
One problem with car horn is the cars that beep it every time you lock your doors...
Almost every car that has the ability to disable this, including my 2004 Subaru. The method was strange and complicated but it did work.
but many people don't and when you live in a dense area, horns beep all the time, often because of that.
I have a 2003 Subaru, and it was just "hold the lock/unlock buttons for two seconds".
Yes, I hate that feature, especially when a rental car has it and I can't figure out easily how to disable it.
There are occasional valid uses for horns. I would like a mandatory feature that limits honks per mile to a reasonable maximum.
For some countries, it could alternatively implement a reasonable minimum limit.