[hedora]

The government-mandated “safety” tone that EV’s play at low speed was invented by a marketing department. They wanted to be able to force everyone to play their audio logos.

Fast-forward a decade, and the bought-off regulators left for industry. The remaining transportation safety people in the US realized the tones are useless, since the sounds are not standardized and are therefore ambiguous and ignorable.

So, moving forward, they’ll standardize the noise, defeating its only practical purpose (branding). Sadly, they didn’t revisit whether it was actually necessary or helpful in the first place.

Our pre-tone EV makes plenty of noise at low speed due to various servos, capacitor whine, drivetrain gears/friction, and so on.