[nfbmi-talk] Quiet Cars

[Fred Wurtzel]

The Silent Killer

Hybrids are so quiet that pedestrians never hear them coming. Now automakers
are

racing to make the car of the future sound like the gas guzzlers of old.

By

Paul Collins

|

Posted Tuesday, May 15, 2012, at 7:07 AM ET

A Toyota Prius car.

The quiet engine of hybrid and electric cars at low speeds poses a risk to
pedestrians

Jed Leicester/Getty Images.

Forget gas mileage: The most striking aspect of the new Ford Focus Electric
is what

itdoesn't

have. "Battery-powered cars are intrinsically quiet, the motor sound falling
between

a whir and a whisper," marvels

aNew York Timesreview of the car

. "But the Focus is deep-space silent, the quietest of the many electric
cars I've

driven."

And that, it turns out, is a problem. Thanks to the

Pedestrian Safety Act of 2010

, by this summer the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration is
required

to initiate a rulemaking process for minimal vehicle noise-not how quiet,
but how

loud

a car must be. That's because NHTSA studies in 2009 (

pdf

) and 2011 (

pdf

) confirmed what many long suspected: Hybrids and electric cars are too
quiet for

the blind or even the fully sighted to hear them coming. Though the NHTSA
found little

statistically significant difference in collisions over 35 mph-when wind and
tire

noise negate the difference in engine noise-at lower speeds, hybrids and
electric

vehicles are 37 percent more likely to hit walkers and 66 percent more
likely to

collide with cyclists than traditional gas-powered cars.

The victims didn't hear it coming-but did automakers? As counterintuitive as
adding

car noise may seem, we've long had comparable safety laws in place: For
instance,

we add foul-smelling Butanethiol to natural gas so that it doesn't sneak up
on us

in our homes. But there's an even more apt comparison: sleigh bells. Back in
the

age of real horsepower, the jingling of bells had little to do with winter
cheer,

and plenty to do with not getting trampled to death. As early as 1797,

Baltimore slapped one-dollar fines

on anyone who didn't make their sleighs noisy enough. Other cities followed
suit,

and even the future Motor City had

a tough sleigh-bell ordinance

that could land silent sleigh drivers in jail.

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The problem that electric cars posed was apparent from the dawn of the motor
industry,

when primitive gas and electric vehicles were already battling for primacy.
As early

as 1900, journalist Cleveland Moffett was hailing the electric car as

"the automobile of the future"

-a status it has held ever since-in no small part due to it being "free from
noise."

A

contemporary electric car guidebook

noted that construction had already advanced to the point where noise was
"scarcely

perceptible." But by 1908, an

electric car guide warns

"with the silent electric car, especial care is needed to avoid running down
incautious

pedestrians." After the death of a pedestrian that same year, one EV driver
was moved

to write to

theCommercial Motor

magazine with the question that has haunted the industry ever since:

"Is Some Noise Desirable?"

:

I would like to raise the question as to the expediency of noiselessly
running motor

vehicles. Not that I wish to commend the present terrible clatter of some of
them;

but, so much having been made of this quality of noiselessness by the
electric-vehicle

people in particular, I will so far as to assert that the worship of
noiselessness

will result in motor vehicles becoming too quiet.

In the absence of much regulation, automakers responded with ... well,
bells. Newspaper

columnist Frederick Othman marveled at driving a

Rauch-Lang Electric Brougham

through St. Louis in 1916: "you went silently like a panther. ... [A pearl
button]

caused a tinkle, like a peculiarly melodious doorbell. The car was so quiet
that

it was inclined to sneak up on pedestrians, and scare 'em. So there was a
good deal

of tinkling."

Though electric cars were to disappear under a sea of petroleum for the next
60 years,

even a brief resurgence of interest in 1964 spurred the

Long Beach Press-Telegram

to note that pedestrians would soon need "agility and good peripheral
vision." When

the oil shocks of the 1970s hit, the renewed interest in EVs quickly
revealed the

problem again, with one 1979 Department of Energy report generating

nationwide headlines of "Electric Cars Too Quiet?"

Automakers were not exactly helpless to respond. The ill-fated

Solargen Electric Motor Car Company

was already selling electric-conversions of the AMC Concord which were
"remarkably

silent," as the

Syracuse Post-Standard

put it, "the only noticeable sound being an electrical 'whine' intentionally
engineered

into the design to warn pedestrians during acceleration of up to 18 mph."
The following

year, the equally ill-fated Amectran Exar-1

boasted

"a noise generator that emits a harmonic tone at speeds under 30 mph." In
Pennsylvania,

when a Gettysburg-area power company used modified electric Dodge Omnis,
Chevrolet

Citations, and Volkswagen Rabbits,

"a noise generator was added to alert pedestrians."

Despite these efforts, and years of complaints by the National Federation of
the

Blind-Honda was aware enough of the problem to file a

1994 patent for an EV noise-generator

-automakers could not or would not hear the problem creeping up behind them.
The

complaints became harder to ignore when, presaging the NHTSA collision
findings the

next year, studies in 2008

from UC-Riverside

and

from Western Michigan University

showed electric vehicles are hard to hear at low speeds.

The response of the industry was clumsy. Many, including Honda and high-end
manufacturer

Tesla Motors, doggedly continued to manufacture hybrid and electric cars
that ignored

the issue. One motive for Tesla becomes apparent when you read their 2011
SEC filings:

The safety feature

"could negatively impact consumer interest in our vehicles."

Nissan Leafs made a half-hearted effort by installing a grating

boop-beep sound

-but featured a mute button, something the new law wouldn't allow. Toyota
and Hyundai

have been more proactive: This

2010 Japanese video

shows Toyota tinkering with the Jetsons-style sound that is now standard on
2012

Priuses.

The most likely sound of the future, though, may be the sound of the past.
Advocates

for the blind have long asked for sounds that mimic other cars, and a recent
NHTSA

study (

pdf

) shows that simulated conventional engine noises can effectively warn
pedestrians

at lower overall volumes than conventional vehicles. Audi's

new R8 eTron sound

, for instance, emits a familiar growl. Whichever standard emerges, by 2017
new hybrids

and electric cars will need federally mandated noisemakers installed-and, in
a little-reported

catch in the law's language, by then the NHTSA may already be moving on
extending

the law to

all

cars that run too quietly, no matter what kind of engine they use.

But that still leaves a fleet of over 1 million quiet cars already on the
road. This

includes the new "deep space quiet" Focus Electric:

Ford says it won't install warning units

on the ones now shipping out. "We just don't want to be too hasty," one
executive

informed the Autotrader website.

Considering that they've now had about a century to solve this problem,
perhaps they

can avoid haste with a tried-and-true solution: Might we suggest the sound
of sleigh

bells?

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