[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.

[emn13]

That noise sounds bad, and unreasonable. I suppose I've just been lucky not to live near anybody that has a car making that kind of noise.

Irrespective of the volume it is remarkable why any car designer thought that this was the right _kind_ of noise for the car to emit. Somebody chose that soundtrack, and you kind of have to wonder why...

[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.

[emn13]

Oh they're quiet here too - it's just that (most) EVs tend to be almost inaudible. They'll make a very quiet whirring noise sometimes, but the volume is so low that you'll easily miss em.

I don't know the people driving these cars well; perhaps they modded them (seems unlikely, given the neighborhood), or perhaps they're old enough to have escaped new requirements; regardless - they're too quiet here in my sample size of 1 neighborhood in NL.

[zbrozek]

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