[tzs]

Also humans do sometimes do use additional senses when driving. For example I've had to make a left turn at a T intersection onto the cross street, where I had a stop sign and the cross traffic did not.

This was in California's central valley where it can get very foggy making it very hard to see traffic until it was almost in the intersection.

It was a quiet rural area though and by opening the windows on both sides and turning off the radio I could hear traffic quite a bit before I could see it. I'd sit at the stop listening until I'd heard a car or two go by to be sure that it was quiet enough that I could hear them. Once I'd calibrated my senses to that day's current conditions I was able to make the turn.

[cjohnson318]

Listening for cars in fog is great until a Prius comes along, and coastal areas of California is their natural habitat. But, yeah, if I had extra senses laying around, I'd use them for all sorts of things.

[zamfi]

Vehicle noise is dominated by road noise beyond about 25 mph -- that's why the mandatory sound on new EVs or Priuses typically cuts out around 20-25mph.

Presumably this intersection is at high enough speed on the cross traffic that it's the road noise tzs is listening for, not engine noise.

[est31]

That's why in the EU they have introduced requirements for electric cars to make artificial sounds. Sometimes one of them drives past and it sounds like a spaceship from a sci fi movie lol.

[bartread]

This is one of the most retrograde pieces of legislative nonsense imaginable.

Just when significantly cutting noise pollution from motor vehicles in urban areas is finally within our grasp we toss it away by forcing them to make stupid and annoying UFO noises on the grounds of nebulous safety concerns.

There were any number of ways of solving this that would have been less annoying and better for peoples' health[0].

For one thing, most people are able to use their eyes and will learn soon enough that EVs don't make much noise at low speeds and will keep an eye out for them. How do I know this? I live in Cambridge, UK, which is brimming with cyclists. They don't make much noise either, but you learn to look out for them (and very quickly too).

And for those who are partially sighted or blind some sort of warning device + appropriate signal could no doubt have been engineered and legislated.

But, no, we've gone for stupid noises instead.

[0] We now, of course, know that noise pollution does in fact cause health issues and, I'd argue, these outweigh the safety argument.

[discreteevent]

I don't think you would make this argument if you had seen up close the damage a car can do to a pedestrian. The problem isn't noise. It's that there are two ton vehicles traveling close to unprotected people. Anything that can mitigate that is a good thing. The argument about noise pollution causing health issues is ridiculous in comparison.

I've heard that some EV drivers turn off the sound because it annoys them. They are potentially setting themselves up for a lifetime of remorse.

[Rufbdbskrufb473]

It's not ridiculous. You need to consider the numbers involved. If one extra person breaks his leg because he didn't look and see the quiet car before crossing the street, that's a fair trade off for reducing the noise pollution for a million people.

[cjbgkagh]

Noise pollution for me is dominated by barking dogs, engine braking, and motorbikes. Making very quite cars less quiet would be comparatively trivial.

[saiya-jin]

You are utterly overblowing one part (noise pollution from EVs, which is really just a bit louder humm, for whatever personal reasons you have) and ignoring the additional, massive and instant benefits of actually saving lives. I definitely appreciate the added noise, so do my small kids, and they don't have to learn this from having school mate killed by ultra quiet car, same for ie elderly. Not living on this planet alone, did you notice?

Noise pollution from ie ambulance, sports car, basically any motorbike, old car, trucks and so on is much much bigger. Where is your outrage for those?

And no, noise pollution from these cars discussed is not causing massive health issues that outweigh people getting maimed and killed by them, thats just your personal preferences (like not owning a car because you are young without a family etc) you would like to push on whole society for whatever personal reasons.

[singleshot_]

Making life much more annoying at the benefit of a few kids getting run over is not automatically a great tradeoff. As a society, we should be thinking harder about these sorts of conundrums. No one wants to get run over and yeah it's a bad outcome, but how far would you go? How many times do you have to get woken up by an Amber alert before you turn it off?

Maybe his personal reason is that he's absolutely capable of getting out of the way of a car, but he doesn't like noise. That's a reasonable preference. If you absolutely can't guarantee that a kid ends up under a car without the noise, fine, but I doubt that's true.

Sure, we dont live on this planet alone, but that seems like it's more justification for not intentionally making our shared space miserable, not less.

[mordae]

From what I've heard, EVs are about as noisy as regular cars at speeds relevant to the noise pollution issue.

Check out: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?t=815

[MontyCarloHall]

>And for those who are partially sighted or blind some sort of warning device + appropriate signal could no doubt have been engineered and legislated.

What do you have in mind? I can’t think of anything as effective as sound—the blind person needs no special hardware to perceive it, and it can be easily spatially localized.

[aqfamnzc]

The EVs/hybrids I've encountered in the US seem to have artificial sound as well when no ICE is running, including the Prius.

[eulers_secret]

Yes, since 2010: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sou...

They turn off over ~18MPH, though. After that, tire noise is much louder. As loud as an ICE car.

So, realistically, you’d hear a Prius if it’s going normal road speeds.

Side note: I wish the sound was more pleasant. When multiple cars are moving in a lot I call it the “choir of the damned”. They’re also louder than ICE cars and that’s kinda lame, we moved backwards WRT noise.

[emn13]

I live in the EU, and EVs are much quieter than ICE cars at low speeds in my day-to-day experience. The volume levels need to be raised significantly from my perspective; they're dangerously low here. There are quite a lot of kids on the roads here, and the difference in audibility between ICE and EV cars is concerning.

Are you saying the typical EVs you hear are _louder_ than ICE cars where you live?

As to the pleasantness of the noise - yeah, that seems to be a manufacturer's choice, or perhaps even driver choice? And let's hope just like annoying ring-tones of years past that the current selection dies out soon...

[sgerenser]

My RAV4 Prime is much louder than an ICE at low speeds, especially in reverse. It’s so loud it’s sparked a bunch of videos and discussion on how to lower the volume: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=q1UqicqdzFE

Some have figured out how to disable it completely (just pulling the noisemaker causes a fault code to trigger) but quieting it down to roughly the volume of an ICE seems more reasonable to me.

[mcny]

> Are you saying the typical EVs you hear are _louder_ than ICE cars where you live?

ICE cars are pretty quiet where I live. Either that or there is so much ambient noise that I've lost some of my hearing but either way I don't hear much of an engine noise with recent cars.

[zbrozek]

Both the regulation and folks' implementation of it is too conservative.

[gambiting]

Volvo plug-in hybrids don't make any noise when driving in EV-only mode. They are super stealthy, you have to be super careful when driving around a car park because no one is aware you're around them.

[bartread]

Yeah, I particularly enjoy being able to sneak up on people in a giant estate/station wagon.

[gambiting]

I mean, I'm not saying this is a good thing. Just an observation that not all hybrids emit noise when driving with the ICE off.

[WirelessGigabit]

Same in the USA, and it his horribly implemented.

Before this a Prius or any modern car would be dead silent at a stop because of stop-start technology. And even those small 1.6L don't make that much noise when idling.

Now you hear all these cars making their high-pitched UFO sound. And it is VERY irritating.

[__MatrixMan__]

I once placed a snot rocket on a Prius windshield from my bicycle. It snuck up on me. So I did the responsible thing and bailed into a neighborhood so I wouldn't have to look them in the eye.

Quiet vehicles should emit a peace cry, and I should look before I rocket.

[alpaca128]

As a cyclist who once got that stuff in his face: yes, please look first. Expecting others to make a noise just in case they might get a bioweapon dumped on them is not nice.

[__MatrixMan__]

Absolutely, I was in the wrong. But if you're entering somebody's bubble, an "on your left" is also courteous.

[nemo44x]

Wait - are snot rockets a common thing for cyclists?!

[vibrio]

…and they can get that much distance on their rockets?

[__MatrixMan__]

Not usually. This Prius was practically in my armpit.

[ndsipa_pomu]

I think the idea of EV making additional noise is flawed. The important thing is that people should be looking when using roads and not just relying on hearing. Deaf people are allowed to drive and they can certainly cycle safely as well as long as they just look around a bit more to keep aware of what's around them.

Having fake noise just encourages pedestrians to keep looking at their phones and not use their eyes when crossing roads or cycle lanes and they can injure themselves or others by doing that.

Also, there's far too much noise in busy areas as it is, so it seems unhelpful to deliberately add extra noise to the environment.

[rightbyte]

The main danger in my experience is that it is harder to hear if the EV is operational when standing still.

[ndsipa_pomu]

If an EV is standing still, then I'd rate the danger level to be zero.

[tshaddox]

But to be fair, that’s just because you couldn’t easily see in that direction. Presumably a Tesla’s cameras can see in all directions.

A better example would probably be hearing emergency sirens before there was any line of sight to the emergency vehicle.

[recursive]

Tesla cameras can't see through fog any better than eyes.

[sundvor]

I think there's a reason why a new sensor suite is rumoured to be imminent. Much better cameras + radar? Key word being "Project Highland".

It won't be a retrofit for older cars, which tells me current owners won't get to experience that next generation on FSD which will be possible.

I never bought mine (Ryzen '22 LR3 with earlier gen radar, now disabled, plus USS - still in use fortunately) for the FSD anyway so I don't mind. I won't blame those who might do though! (This is presently all speculation/rumours until officially confirmed).

[judge2020]

Must be out of the loop. HW4, which is higher resolution cameras and Phoenix HD Radar, has been in S/X for months and started showing up in (at least Fremont) Model Y's with a build date around May 25th. Highland has nothing to do with this, and Model 3 sales are still doing fine, so they don't need to drop anything yet to boost model 3 demand.

[v0idzer0]

Dropping prices doesn’t even have to be about demand. Lot of rivals like Lucid and Rivian struggling mightily in this market. You can pinch them out. You also may just want to share production efficiency gains with the customer for the same reason.

[sundvor]

Oh thanks, appreciate the updated info.

[rootusrootus]

Model 3 currently has a $3000 discount to boost demand.

[judge2020]

A 3k price drop shows they only need a little bit of a demand boost, especially since the discount is only on inventory cars. Highland will be a massive demand bump for them, since it being new likely pushes some Y purchasers to the 3.

[zebomon]

Is this true though? Earlier today mine picked up on emergency lights that were several hundred feet further away in traffic than I would have seen them. It seems able to enhance the images the cameras capture.

[GenerocUsername]

Could also be aware of the position of fixed road equipment via mapping software. It's more plausible than the cameras having some kind of super vision.

[zebomon]

It was a police car, not something fixed. I would imagine that the Tesla has zoom built into its camera system, whereas human vision does not.

[judge2020]

Realistically the training data contained some amount of emergency lights through fog, so it can identify faint emergency lights through fog as real emergency lights and will appropriately display the warning on-screen.

[Blahah]

Of course they can. Fog doesn't block mid-IR.

[drno123]

MWIR sensors are even more expensive than LIDAR, are military controlled and dofficult to export, and Tesla does not have them.

[snovv_crash]

Lidar can't see through fog either.

[dieselgate]

That’s precisely the reason why busses and maybe other commercial vehicles must stop at railroad crossings before passing