Need them here in the UK. There are so many cars modified to have explosive sounding exhausts it's unreal. I get woken up regularly in the night when they drive them around at 2AM making a lot of noise. I still don't get why anyone would want to drive around sounding like that. There is no reason other than you want to look like a complete wanker and at that point society should crush your car to a fucking cube instantly.
Edit: turns out we do have them and they have been fining people. But it's mostly supercars. The problem is with shitty little cars with stupid exhausts which outnumber the supercars by at least two orders of magnitude.
I still don't get why anyone would want to drive around sounding like that.
Evidence from game behavior suggests ~30% of people are willing to experience some cost to themselves in order to inflict a greater one on other people. People like this don't feel they are winning unless someone else is losing. If true, this explains a great deal.
Outright malice probably only explains a small fraction of it. Partly it's just fun to make a lot of noise, and if you have little/no respect for other people then why not?
That is a good study, and it does explain one of the behaviors.
But do not discount the importance of powerlessness in these behaviors. People who have relatively less power in their work, their surroundings, their relationships, there ability to influence their own econonmic situation, etc, still need a way to express power. It is easy to couch it merely in terms of winning/losing in the moment, but without context it is hard to see what the right solution is.
If it is merely winning/losing/greater cost, with no particular motivation, then banning any particular annoying activity is as good a regulation as any other.
But when you take away a dimension of power over an area that a person strongly associates with "basic freedoms" such as owning a camaro/civic/harley/gixxer and tuning it to their liking, including making it incredibly and illegally loud, you are making a more fundamental policy decision than you might realize.
My take is that these make for bad county/state/federal laws. They are fine for city laws that are associated with modest fines, because that is the kind of law that continues to enable some expression of control and personal power-- an important part of dignity.
They annoy me. The people and their exhausts branded "Neighbor Haters." But so do the pedestrians who choose to enter the intersection when the red hand is up and the countdown timer is at 3 seconds, and they feign feebleness in order to take nearly a minute to cross the street while 500 people in gridlock wait in all directions. But I see it for what it is and choose to respect their dignity, probably when they need it most.
This is an extremely depressing statistic to read. I hope that it's something we can modify culturally rather than being a hard-wired part of our brains.
This does not explain it, qnd trying to do so through biology is the wrong angle.
This issue is purely a cultural one, not a biological one, but this is not popular to investigate because 1. it's considered impossible to solve and 2. brings up difficult questions regarding cultural relativity that aren't appreciated in the modern academic Anglosphere.
I'm continuously surprised that even on HN this comes up so often. A phenomenon is presented which is orders of magnitude more common in one culture than another, yet what is reached for is a biological, tech, or otherwise "hard science" explanation.
In this case, the phenomenon is one of publically inflicting harm on others at a cost and no gain to themselves.
I guess it has to do with the community (understandably!) having a strong tendency to approach everything from a STEM PoV when it comes to all but a small number of (mostly US-specific, policy or economic) topics.
Just to prevent misunderstandings here, culture here doesn't mean the culture of a nation but of (much smaller) communities, in 2023.
Motorcycles too. Around here idiots revving and redlining their engine is a relatively regular occurrence. Much more so than cars, although that also happens from time to time.
I live in a motorcycle-heavy US town (blue collar, lots of guys who wish they were 1%ers - the biker outlaw variety, not the rich people variety). It sounds like a warzone during shift change around the industrial districts.
Having been neighbors with a lot of these guys, it has been repeatedly explained to me that theh make their bikes louder to be heard for safety. The assumption here is car drivers are so engaged with their music/podcasts/whatever turned up that they don't pay attention to the traffic around them. They also tend to not look when switching lanes or, gods forbid, use their turn signal to show intent.
While this sounds like a reasonable argument, I think it's a load of bullpucky. Motorcycles are loud by default, and using aftermarket parts to make them louder is just part of the self-affirming statement of ego. These guys need you to know how big and bad they believe themselves to be that they'll make other sacrifices in their lives to afford projecting that image.
Underpowered scooters/mopeds can also be a huge problem (near me this is the main noise problem at night - usually food delivery drivers) - they get very noisy when they go a bit faster in a way more powerful motorbikes don't.
Some idiots on motorcycles blast music at 120dB in addition to engine noise. Back when I lived some thirty yards from a fairly busy street, I couldn’t hear any car traffic, but these motorcycles announced their arrival from a mile away.
Live near a 'late shop' where teens 'hang out', and most of the time the wankers revving their bikes here are doing it to impress teenage girls, sadly being able to overhear them occasionally, it seems to work.
One particular bike owner literally just rides around in a rectangular pattern most evenings, over and over, revving only when he gets the junction in front of where the teens hang out - yes, I can hear his bike on all 4 sides of the pattern.
However, the most annoying motorist we get, is a middle aged woman who owns a white audi and sits arming/disarming and triggering her alarm whenever she sends her husband/partner into the shop, she performs this ritual 2-3 times a day usually. Very annoying hearing 'bip.... bip bip bip... bip. wuuuuwuuuuwuuu bip, bip bip bip...' and so on.
I regularly lie awake as some idiot is racing round residential London streets in the distance, in densely populated areas it must be in the thousands of people that are being disrupted by a single person.
thousands of people that are being disrupted by a single person
We are in a very weird place as a culture where this isn’t necessarily considered a slam dunk to come down super hard on whatever it is. The pendulum has swung way too far, we need to move back in the direction of protecting the community.
When I moved to London from Central Europe, I was surprised how many people drive with loud exhausts in residential areas. It was especially annoying during the night, when every fifteen minutes some idiot would drive down the nearby 2-lane road (Aerodrome Rd, Colindale) at full throttle.
It’s actually ridiculous the level of noise some people drive around making. People buy “pop and bang” ECU tunes that when combined with a aftermarket exhaust make their car sound like a howitzer. I live on a main road, and there are some cars driving around at night that I can hear half a mile away or more. The cops or council should seize the cars and the owners should have to pay to have the mods undone before they can get them returned.
The other thing I don’t understand is how in the UK these people are passing MOTs. Either they are colluding with a garage to get fake passes, or they are on fake plates, or they’re undoing the mod every year when they need to go get an MOT.
We already have them in some areas (along with PSPOs which create the legal basis to fine for excessive noise). I think Knighsbridge was the first but believe they now also have them on Brompton Road and a few others - see here https://www.mylondon.news/news/west-london-news/london-counc...
I never understood the desire to be loud. My EV is probably faster than most of the cars on the road screaming at the top of their lungs and showing off their engines and it's whisper quiet. I like it that way.
Prior to the current generation of very fast EVs, having a louder vehicle was a way to indicate more power. A more powerful (internal combustion) engine implies more noise. Of course the reverse doesn't apply, more noise doesn't strictly imply more power - it can just be an exhaust with lousy noise suppression. ALSO you might eke a little more power from an engine with less back pressure from the exhaust, so there is some real effect available.
So if you've got some modified monster with an insane engine, it's going to be loud. And if you're a wannabe with a superficially-modified, underpowered car, you can add more noise easier than you can add more power, and hope to fool people. It's not very laudable, but you can see how it could motivate the ego of the inconsiderate.
I don't think it is about the speed. My combine tops out at 18MPH, but there is something about the sound its engine makes when it is revved up – and when you throw the hydro level forward, oh boy.
I also enjoy concerts, though. Understandably music isn't for everyone.
Blame Jeremy Clarkson and the car culture he fostered. For decades, new and old cars were judged by their ability to spin their wheels around a test track, and by the loudness of their exhaust heard inside a tunnel.
Blaming Clarkson for loud cars is like blaming videogames for mass shootings. Car yobs, and the tuning culture, existed way before Top Gear became popular entertainment, but is nearly as old as the invention of the automobile.
I'm a Brit (living in Germany) and I think it's much more related to our hatred of rule-following, combined with austerity. I am still surprised at how rebellious people are in the UK. During COVID, I barely saw any police confront those who weren't wearing masks. When I moved to Hamburg, the transport security would stand at the stations and if they saw someone asleep on the S-Bahn with their mask falling off they would go on the train and berate them. One funny thing was getting the S-Bahn from the airport, all the Brits would not be wearing masks even though you were required to by law. They would keep it up for about 3 stops before getting scared at all the staring and putting their masks on. Frankly, it's just a very different world. In the UK, it genuinely seems like the police are often too scared to confront anti-social behaviour. This is not so in mainland Europe
There’s a marked difference between a performance car with an aggressive exhaust under wide open throttle and a modified economy car with a stupid loud exhaust under normal driving.
Even the super cars have to obey noise regulations. The modified cars can be 10-20dB louder, which is a lot.
I’d blame the people doing that, not the one who makes a show, it is not because I like cars and like to run them on tracks I am responsible for those who drive modified cars in urban areas
Oh come on. He’s a terrible person, loud cars are a freaking nuisance, but to claim that he’s the reason everyone from Thai teenagers to Georgian gangsters to Emirati chammaks[0] is removing their muffler because of him is bizarrely and myopically Anglocentric.
Part of it is the prevalence of "pop and bang" maps, modified ECU configuration which changes timing and allows unburnt fuel to enter the hot exhaust and explode.
There is a purpose to this in turbocharged cars in motor racing - anti-lag - as the extra gases keep the turbo spinning during gear changes. No reason for it on public roads though.
There's also a lot of "cat deletes" (removal of catalytic converters to improve exhaust gas flow and increase engine power). Illegal, but very common to see on YouTube and just like pretty much anything else illegal on the roads in the UK these days, the police don't seem to care at all.
> There are so many cars modified to have explosive sounding exhausts it's unreal
> There is no reason other than you want to look like a complete wanker
In case anyone doesn’t know, the pop sound can serve a real purpose. The sound comes from extra fuel being ignited in the exhaust, which is done to keep the turbo spinning when you let off the gas. It helps minimize turbo lag. It also occurs in older race cars that had carburetors because they had less precise control over fuel injection compared to modern cars.
That said, some people tune their car to imitate that sound with no purpose just cause they think it sounds cool. They waste extra fuel just to sound like that.
There’s also the pop on gear shifts, due to killing the spark on gear shifts for a faster shift. The alternative is that awful dreadful rev-hang in standard transmission cars.
same here by me in a random part of the US. My house sits on a street that is not incorporated by the local city so the sheriff has jurisdiction over it and won't bother to send a squad car to watch for speeding. It's a residential street that is very straight for the area and easy to see on. The speed limit is 35 mph but I have clocked people going 80 mph past my house. I think people know it for being a good road to speed on. One car used both lanes to do a speed test and the marks are still on the street, smoke all over my yard from that one.
I noticed it increased after 2020. My theory was here at least that people got accustomed to speeding from the empty roads and lower enforcement but I think the extremely low interest rates let people get into the car market and a lot of people bought obnoxious cars and modded them. Some people must like that noise. I think it's a signal of how their car is fast and they are willing to flaunt rules.
My old high school friends put noisy exhaust systems on because the unrestricted systems promised to increase the hp of their 100hp honda civics by 5-10hp. BMW actually used to play fake engine noises through the speakers bc they were afraid the cars had become to quiet. Harley Davidsons whole reason for existence is to be noisy. Wankers everywhere.
Same problem in the US. 16year olds think the only way to be cool is to attach a stupid rattler to your exhaust, or cut a hole to make it louder, or intentionally make it backfire.
Did something change with regard to the value of a catalytic converter in the last ten years? Has the recycling market become more open than it used to be?
Doesn't always work when the car is modified to make as much noise as possible. There's one near us that speeds up and down but the exhaust sounds like a gun being fired. Seriously loud and obnoxious.a
This is great. Noise pollution really is a massive blind spot in vehicle regulations. Even combustion-powered cars can be made pretty quiet, but morons associate "loud" with "fast", so manufacturers keep installing defeat devices in the mufflers. Motorcycles are even worse. The noise measurements are apparently made under completely unrealistic operating conditions, and on the road they are many times louder than most cars.
My 1200 petrol car is so quiet you can't actually hear the engine from within the car, and there's no sound damping under the bonnet (no top engine cover, no padding on the bonnet itself despite the mounting there for it), so petrol cars can absolutely be quiet.
I think the thing with motorbikes is everything is so much more exposed, and they rev higher in general, so the sound thing is probably a harder problem.
I am actually of the belief that motorbikes and scooters should be encouraged in cities, because they are a lot smaller, and more efficient in general than cars (so long as you don't have a massive bike), and take up a lot less space when parking. Do most people really need a 1.5 tonne car to go to work as opposed to a 200kg bike?
> I think the thing with motorbikes is everything is so much more exposed, and they rev higher in general, so the sound thing is probably a harder problem.
Meh. Some have figured a way to make them quiet. Most "touring" bikes are very reasonable. I'm thinking BMW K16s, Honda Goldwings, Yamaha FJRs. With stock pipes, of course. Hell, even my VFR1200 is very quiet with the stock pipe, which closes a flap below 5000 RPM. When idling at a traffic light, if there's a car around, I can't hear the bike.
It’s a great theory, but it has a problem. There are quiet motorcycles. For example, BMW motorcycles are quiet.
[BMW made a cruiser bike for a few years. They were trying to move into Harley’s market segment. In order to get the “right” sound they had to detune the engine, resulting in a massive decrease in horsepower.]
> My 1200 petrol car is so quiet you can't actually hear the engine from within the ca
Because your car is actually insulated from that noise. Look at every car review ever and there is a section about noise isolation.
Furthermore the sound is also dependent on the length of exhaust - your average car exhausts is longer than a whole bike and for example previously mentioned BMWs wriggle it around the whole engine back and forth just for that reason. This comes at the price of weight and thus handling/fuel efficiency and actual pollution.
With motorcycles, it's a choice, but loud bikes are tied very closely to perceived power and manliness for some riders, plus the whole patently-bullshit POV of "loud pipes save lives." Honestly, it's MOSTLY Harley riders, at least in the US.
I have a motorcycle. It's louder than a car is, but it's not obnoxiously loud at all. You can't hear it from inside YOUR car, for example. Further, I can have a conversation with someone without turning the bike off. MOST motorcycles are like this, in fact. But the loud assholes kinda ruin the overall reputation for everyone.
I wish they'd bring this to near me. I'm especially interested because I'm a motorcyclist. Seems 90% of riders get angry when an exhaust isn't loud as a jet and it's often one of the first mods people make.
I couldn't care less and prefer not to annoy everyone in a 100 yard radius from me.
Unlike what most riders will say loud pipes don't really save lives, good and safe riding does. They just use this excuse for the mistakes they make most of the time.
I always thought it was an excuse. Like, 'Check out my cool bike. It's matte black because that looks cool. I got a pretty rad old-school matte black helmet to match. And of course a black riding jacket. Oh yeah, and I set the carburetor to sound like a cessna because cars don't see us!'
I was looking at a house with my wife that was relatively close to a major road. I wasn't sure if it was going to be an issue or not. A loud bike drove by and we crossed that house off the list.
If I had a bike, I'd model my look after a disco ball instead of the road tar.
I mean I won't lie, I like how my bikes look. I like the style of wearing my gear and whatnot. It's what I grew up aspiring to do, I wanted to ride from the time I was like 12.
I'm 31 now and have ridden all my adulthood and still like the style, but I don't intend to announce my presence via annoying sound to everyone within a football field radius.
I actively try to be a friendly driver unlike some of the dumbasses I share this hobby with who make us all look bad.
> Seems 90% of riders get angry when an exhaust isn't loud as a jet and it's often one of the first mods people make.
I am a motorcyclist, and I get angry when I hear a loud motorcycle. I want my next motorcycle to be as quiet as possible! And I want people to be fined when they produce such high levels of noise pollution.
In most countries there is a mandatory periodic technical examination for motor vehicles (like MOT, TÜV, etc) where lights are tested for exactly this reason.
Also, I don't think people tilt their headlamps up on purpose.
The reason exhausts are loud is that there is detonation happening inside the exhaust. This happens when you increase the fuel-air mixture above what the cylinders will support for combustion and often gives slightly (maybe 10%) better performance of the car, for the cost of much lower lifetime of many components (not just the cylinders), and of course making enough noise to wake the dead.
There's plenty of motorcyclists who do the same though.
Even though what you describe has, for some reason, become much more common lately, many exhausts are just loud for no good reason. Think Harleys or even the Yamaha TMax with the Akrapovic exhaust. They don't have the "pop-pop-pop" sound related to detonations, but are still absurdly loud.
> There's plenty of motorcyclists who do the same though.
What's funny is that in my neck of the woods, it's motorcycles with bad aftermarket pipes that had been making that noise for a long time. So now, whenever I hear a car making that noise, instead of associating it with some "big mean engine" as their owners probably hope, I associate it with some overworked 600cc.
Some people optimize for the noise, and not performance, for the same reason people stick racing decals and put a spoiler on a car that doesn't really need it.
Heck, some people will literally drill a hole in the exhaust to get that noise, for absolutely no performance benefit whatsoever.
I don’t know about that. I have an older sport quad ATV. Loud AF with custom exhaust the last owner installed. I have full control of the fuel delivery with the carb mixture/jetting/etc, and there is no nothing other than preventing backfiring/popping that has any effect on the noise. I even tried repacking the “muffler” with new stuffing—- didn’t help.
OT: It's not actually a "noise camera". It's a speed camera with some directional microphones that triggers if there is too much noise, probably with some filtering to try to avoid triggering on noise that isn't loud car noise.
There are actually acoustic cameras that are much more like a "camera" in that you get a 2D map of the sound reaching the device. This can be overlaid on an image from a light camera and you get an image where you can see where all the sounds are coming from.
Some of them can make acoustic movies, where each frame is a light camera image overlaid with the sound map, usually coloring the optical image based on the sound with color indicating frequency and brightness indicating loudness.
With these you can do neat things like make a sharp sound and see the echo bounce around a room, or look at something making a variety of sounds and see which sounds are coming from where.
They often include software that is kind of an audio image version of Photoshop. You can use that software's equivalent of the eye dropper tool to point anywhere in the image and here the sound coming from that point. E.g., if you had an acoustic movie of the strings of piano and the pianist was playing a 10 note chord you could pick an individual string and play back the sound of just that string.
Here's a video where science YouTuber Steve Mould was loaned some to play around with, showing some of the cool things you can do with them [1].
It's a minor nit-pick either way but a speed camera doesn't make an image of the speed nor usually use images to calculate speed. It usually measures the speed using radar, laser or wire loops and then captures an image. So I think the term "noise camera" makes sense in this context.
I am in Amsterdam right now. Two things you notice quick when you are where Dutch people actually live (i.e. outside of Centraal): first, that it is remarkably quiet, and second, that cars are remarkably loud.
The loudest vehicles are the mopeds, though. It's almost like they don't have mufflers. I wonder if they are regulated differently?
My maxi scooter has its OEM mufflers and it isn't too noisy.
Problem is many people mount noisy aftermarket ones. They mount back the original one when they have the scheduled inspection.
Having said that, outside of the amount of decibels there are engines that are more annoying. 2-strokes high pitch screamers and single and bi-cylinder with lots of low frequency / bass noise.
And there are models that are probably made to pass homologation but do higher noise outside of the rev range used during homologation/inspection. The Yamaha T-Max is one example. It should be prohibited and all its drivers euthanasied. I am obviously joking for the second part but I have never encountered a decent human being riding one, they only attracts the worse of humanity. Yamaha should be ashamed of that.
I did a brief stint in Hoogte Kadijk one summer a few years back , seriously I actually developed severe depression which I think was from lack of sleep due to the unusual heat , the mopeds going past and the Airbnb guests checking into our old building at all hours making so much noise.
I couldn’t wait to leave, which was sad because the winter and autumn was absolutely bliss. We had a great life there.
The mopeds were astoundingly loud though, I’ll never forget it, I had PTSD, I could hear them coming from a ways off and it would make my blood boil before they went past and fuel my insomnia.
What is funny is the mopeds are still plaguing me in a different part of the world now :) they should be banned altogether, they suck.
When i was a kid, removing or significantly altering the muffler was the #1 mod to obtain more speed, and then of course there was the psychological effect of making noise to let everyone know you were around, which to me isn't that different to beasts growling loud to mark a wider territory. I guess that is normal for kids, not so much for grown ups.
Yes, 50cc scooters were subjectively as loud as 500cc grand prix bikes and made only 40 km/h. I hated them even when I was 14, the age when I could start driving one.
I live in Amsterdam and beg to differ. You are probably only referring to Jordaan, indeed it's pretty quiet for a simple reason: most streets aren't accessible by car (or if they are, they are a huge pain to drive around on). Have you been to de Pijp? Or the Oud Zuid? They're much more accessible by car and they're also incredibly noisy. I have lived in all 3 and can tell you that the difference is noticeable to say the least.
And also in Holland they barred right from the start using a mobile phone in restaurants which I love. I remember walking around the cobblestones one evening wearing dress shoes with a solid wood heal and got a lot of dirty looks for the clops. Not surprised at all this innovation is Dutch.
Last night I was listening to audio, went outside for a walk, quiet area, but when a car drove by I couldn’t hear what was being said for maybe 6 seconds, from the headphones that were pushed right into my ear holes.
What had been a comfortable speech listening volume is dwarfed by ordinary cars, not even modded boy racer cars speeding, just basic sedans doing the speed limit.
I listen to stuff on my headphones quite a lot when walking. In my previous city, I never had any hearing problems. I am now in a place where the larger your car (truck), the cooler you are. Its impossible to listen to anything because the cars are so loud. The old cities had smaller cars driving slower.
> “He’s the “everything could be done on a bike” type of guy.”
No? He drives cars, uses multiple car rental/car shares schemes, often says that it’s not cars he dislikes it’s urban design which leads to car dependency - unsafe for anyone outside a car, no provision for anything other than driving, single family housing zoning leading to everything being too spread out to go anywhere without a car - and that he’s not a ‘cyclist’ and would prefer taking a tram when possible.
The channel is even called “not just bikes” to push back against your kind of mischaracterisation.
> I kind of like his ideas (I know the channel), but he’s heavily biased against cars. He’s the “everything could be done on a bike” type of guy.
It's kind of hard to over emphasize the the damage they've done, specifically as forms of personal transportation (versus more commercial transport).
He does have a video called "The Best Country in the World for Drivers", in which he shows that by reducing the need for cars for most people, actually helps the optimize things for operating a car:
I used to walk through midtown new york city every day.
It's incredibly people-dense so there's definitely some baseline human noise, but I cannot emphasize enough how absolutely dwarfed by cars and delivery trucks it is. Construction work, shouting, music, etc. are almost a non-factor in comparison.
there's a new roundabout currently under construction about 200m from my house. i can hear the construction equipment working early in the morning and mid-afternoon when the road is quiet, but 90% of the time the construction noise is completely drowned out by the normal road noise, from the road on the far side of the roundabout. construction noise from a dozen pieces of heavy equipment working all day just isn't a significant source of noise compared to a moderately busy road. not to mention that in a few months the construction will be done, but the road will always be there.
"people shouting" and "loud music" don't even factor.
> He’s the “everything could be done on a bike” type of guy
While not everything can be done on a bike, a lot of people use a car when there is no need to. I can't understand why because cycling is way more enjoyable and in most cases a much faster way to get around town than a car. Especially if you own an e-bike.
I own a car but hardly feel the need to use it. I usually need to buy a full tank of gas once or twice a year.
His channel is literally named NOT JUST bikes...
He makes a lot of points about other aspects of safety, like speed bumps/other speed limiters, safe roundabouts, public transportation, etc...
Cars are by far the biggest noise contributor in a city and tbh i'd like drivers to pay a tax based on max sound a car may make on max engine speed(and if they want to pay less tax, speed should be physically limited to max 100km/h or something similar based on gps. But that's just a fantasy
This is why I kind of like the idea of so-called "Active Sound Design"[1]--where car makers are starting to play vroom-vroom noises over the internal speaker system to make their engines sound louder. Car enthusiasts criticize it as "fake engine noise" but it's actually brilliant: The only person who really cares that someone's car is loud and obnoxious is that car's driver, so let him blast himself with vroom-vroom and let everyone else enjoy a slightly quieter existence.
Never looked at it like that. My gut reaction when hearing about this first was a huge eye roll, ugh these babies, but now after you said that, hmmm, if it makes the car on the outside quiet...
This sounds great and all, but…. I live in an urban residential neighborhood and have a major hospital at the end of our block. Our street is a pretty big cut through street.
Yeah loud engines and music (and phone calls!) from cars is annoying, but that’s not where most of the sound comes from.
It is just tires on the asphalt that is so loud. I don’t know if this is due to how heavy American cars have gotten or changing roads from concrete to asphalt, but it has become quite unbearable.
The rise of e-bikes and personal mobility scooters has helped cut down on the noise somewhat, but I don’t know what you do about regular car noise (other than banning cars).
Also, whatever vehicle designer that decided the horn should honk whenever the car locks — you are on the top of my list!
> Also, whatever vehicle designer that decided the horn should honk whenever the car locks — you are on the top of my list!
This should be illegal. I sort of get it 30 years ago when aftermarket & OEM car alarms were a new thing, but that's it's still acceptable in 2023 is asinine.
No artificial sound should be allowed when locking or unlocking a car. Maybe flashing the headlights at most.
My last sedan would beep when you hit the lock button twice, which was great because I could lock it without being annoying but I could also use a beacon to find it in a parking lot. Now, my new RAV4 makes the tiniest little blip no matter how you lock it, it's only audible from a few feet away, so I can never find it in a parking lot.
Readit News
Edit: turns out we do have them and they have been fining people. But it's mostly supercars. The problem is with shitty little cars with stupid exhausts which outnumber the supercars by at least two orders of magnitude.
Evidence from game behavior suggests ~30% of people are willing to experience some cost to themselves in order to inflict a greater one on other people. People like this don't feel they are winning unless someone else is losing. If true, this explains a great deal.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.1600451 - see figure 3 if you want to get right to it.
But do not discount the importance of powerlessness in these behaviors. People who have relatively less power in their work, their surroundings, their relationships, there ability to influence their own econonmic situation, etc, still need a way to express power. It is easy to couch it merely in terms of winning/losing in the moment, but without context it is hard to see what the right solution is.
If it is merely winning/losing/greater cost, with no particular motivation, then banning any particular annoying activity is as good a regulation as any other.
But when you take away a dimension of power over an area that a person strongly associates with "basic freedoms" such as owning a camaro/civic/harley/gixxer and tuning it to their liking, including making it incredibly and illegally loud, you are making a more fundamental policy decision than you might realize.
My take is that these make for bad county/state/federal laws. They are fine for city laws that are associated with modest fines, because that is the kind of law that continues to enable some expression of control and personal power-- an important part of dignity.
They annoy me. The people and their exhausts branded "Neighbor Haters." But so do the pedestrians who choose to enter the intersection when the red hand is up and the countdown timer is at 3 seconds, and they feign feebleness in order to take nearly a minute to cross the street while 500 people in gridlock wait in all directions. But I see it for what it is and choose to respect their dignity, probably when they need it most.
This issue is purely a cultural one, not a biological one, but this is not popular to investigate because 1. it's considered impossible to solve and 2. brings up difficult questions regarding cultural relativity that aren't appreciated in the modern academic Anglosphere.
I'm continuously surprised that even on HN this comes up so often. A phenomenon is presented which is orders of magnitude more common in one culture than another, yet what is reached for is a biological, tech, or otherwise "hard science" explanation.
In this case, the phenomenon is one of publically inflicting harm on others at a cost and no gain to themselves.
I guess it has to do with the community (understandably!) having a strong tendency to approach everything from a STEM PoV when it comes to all but a small number of (mostly US-specific, policy or economic) topics.
Just to prevent misunderstandings here, culture here doesn't mean the culture of a nation but of (much smaller) communities, in 2023.
"In a perfectly predictable and rational world filled with rational actors, here is what would happen!".
Except people aren't rational actors, they don't have all information available to them, and there aren't any "rules of the game" in real life.
Having been neighbors with a lot of these guys, it has been repeatedly explained to me that theh make their bikes louder to be heard for safety. The assumption here is car drivers are so engaged with their music/podcasts/whatever turned up that they don't pay attention to the traffic around them. They also tend to not look when switching lanes or, gods forbid, use their turn signal to show intent.
While this sounds like a reasonable argument, I think it's a load of bullpucky. Motorcycles are loud by default, and using aftermarket parts to make them louder is just part of the self-affirming statement of ego. These guys need you to know how big and bad they believe themselves to be that they'll make other sacrifices in their lives to afford projecting that image.
It's really all very silly, to be honest.
If something can’t be safe for the operator without being a nuisance to thousands of people along their route, then it shouldn’t be on the road.
Bring on the fines for loud motorcycles. It’s ridiculous that we let this problem proliferate.
One particular bike owner literally just rides around in a rectangular pattern most evenings, over and over, revving only when he gets the junction in front of where the teens hang out - yes, I can hear his bike on all 4 sides of the pattern.
However, the most annoying motorist we get, is a middle aged woman who owns a white audi and sits arming/disarming and triggering her alarm whenever she sends her husband/partner into the shop, she performs this ritual 2-3 times a day usually. Very annoying hearing 'bip.... bip bip bip... bip. wuuuuwuuuuwuuu bip, bip bip bip...' and so on.
We are in a very weird place as a culture where this isn’t necessarily considered a slam dunk to come down super hard on whatever it is. The pendulum has swung way too far, we need to move back in the direction of protecting the community.
The other thing I don’t understand is how in the UK these people are passing MOTs. Either they are colluding with a garage to get fake passes, or they are on fake plates, or they’re undoing the mod every year when they need to go get an MOT.
So if you've got some modified monster with an insane engine, it's going to be loud. And if you're a wannabe with a superficially-modified, underpowered car, you can add more noise easier than you can add more power, and hope to fool people. It's not very laudable, but you can see how it could motivate the ego of the inconsiderate.
I also enjoy concerts, though. Understandably music isn't for everyone.
Also, here's some AI generated Top Gear to give you nightmares: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYWCIJgw610
Even the super cars have to obey noise regulations. The modified cars can be 10-20dB louder, which is a lot.
0: choosing countries I’m familiar with
There is a purpose to this in turbocharged cars in motor racing - anti-lag - as the extra gases keep the turbo spinning during gear changes. No reason for it on public roads though.
There's also a lot of "cat deletes" (removal of catalytic converters to improve exhaust gas flow and increase engine power). Illegal, but very common to see on YouTube and just like pretty much anything else illegal on the roads in the UK these days, the police don't seem to care at all.
> There is no reason other than you want to look like a complete wanker
In case anyone doesn’t know, the pop sound can serve a real purpose. The sound comes from extra fuel being ignited in the exhaust, which is done to keep the turbo spinning when you let off the gas. It helps minimize turbo lag. It also occurs in older race cars that had carburetors because they had less precise control over fuel injection compared to modern cars.
That said, some people tune their car to imitate that sound with no purpose just cause they think it sounds cool. They waste extra fuel just to sound like that.
I noticed it increased after 2020. My theory was here at least that people got accustomed to speeding from the empty roads and lower enforcement but I think the extremely low interest rates let people get into the car market and a lot of people bought obnoxious cars and modded them. Some people must like that noise. I think it's a signal of how their car is fast and they are willing to flaunt rules.
How anyone can be comfortable annoying more people per hour than they'll meet in their entire life I'll never understand.
I think the thing with motorbikes is everything is so much more exposed, and they rev higher in general, so the sound thing is probably a harder problem.
I am actually of the belief that motorbikes and scooters should be encouraged in cities, because they are a lot smaller, and more efficient in general than cars (so long as you don't have a massive bike), and take up a lot less space when parking. Do most people really need a 1.5 tonne car to go to work as opposed to a 200kg bike?
Meh. Some have figured a way to make them quiet. Most "touring" bikes are very reasonable. I'm thinking BMW K16s, Honda Goldwings, Yamaha FJRs. With stock pipes, of course. Hell, even my VFR1200 is very quiet with the stock pipe, which closes a flap below 5000 RPM. When idling at a traffic light, if there's a car around, I can't hear the bike.
I find that their exhaust smells much worse though, especially scooters.
[BMW made a cruiser bike for a few years. They were trying to move into Harley’s market segment. In order to get the “right” sound they had to detune the engine, resulting in a massive decrease in horsepower.]
Because your car is actually insulated from that noise. Look at every car review ever and there is a section about noise isolation.
Furthermore the sound is also dependent on the length of exhaust - your average car exhausts is longer than a whole bike and for example previously mentioned BMWs wriggle it around the whole engine back and forth just for that reason. This comes at the price of weight and thus handling/fuel efficiency and actual pollution.
With motorcycles, it's a choice, but loud bikes are tied very closely to perceived power and manliness for some riders, plus the whole patently-bullshit POV of "loud pipes save lives." Honestly, it's MOSTLY Harley riders, at least in the US.
I have a motorcycle. It's louder than a car is, but it's not obnoxiously loud at all. You can't hear it from inside YOUR car, for example. Further, I can have a conversation with someone without turning the bike off. MOST motorcycles are like this, in fact. But the loud assholes kinda ruin the overall reputation for everyone.
I couldn't care less and prefer not to annoy everyone in a 100 yard radius from me.
Unlike what most riders will say loud pipes don't really save lives, good and safe riding does. They just use this excuse for the mistakes they make most of the time.
I was looking at a house with my wife that was relatively close to a major road. I wasn't sure if it was going to be an issue or not. A loud bike drove by and we crossed that house off the list.
If I had a bike, I'd model my look after a disco ball instead of the road tar.
I'm 31 now and have ridden all my adulthood and still like the style, but I don't intend to announce my presence via annoying sound to everyone within a football field radius.
I actively try to be a friendly driver unlike some of the dumbasses I share this hobby with who make us all look bad.
I am a motorcyclist, and I get angry when I hear a loud motorcycle. I want my next motorcycle to be as quiet as possible! And I want people to be fined when they produce such high levels of noise pollution.
Also, I don't think people tilt their headlamps up on purpose.
Modifying any vehicle just to make it louder seems really, really rude to me.
There's plenty of motorcyclists who do the same though.
> There's plenty of motorcyclists who do the same though.
What's funny is that in my neck of the woods, it's motorcycles with bad aftermarket pipes that had been making that noise for a long time. So now, whenever I hear a car making that noise, instead of associating it with some "big mean engine" as their owners probably hope, I associate it with some overworked 600cc.
Heck, some people will literally drill a hole in the exhaust to get that noise, for absolutely no performance benefit whatsoever.
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There are actually acoustic cameras that are much more like a "camera" in that you get a 2D map of the sound reaching the device. This can be overlaid on an image from a light camera and you get an image where you can see where all the sounds are coming from.
Some of them can make acoustic movies, where each frame is a light camera image overlaid with the sound map, usually coloring the optical image based on the sound with color indicating frequency and brightness indicating loudness.
With these you can do neat things like make a sharp sound and see the echo bounce around a room, or look at something making a variety of sounds and see which sounds are coming from where.
They often include software that is kind of an audio image version of Photoshop. You can use that software's equivalent of the eye dropper tool to point anywhere in the image and here the sound coming from that point. E.g., if you had an acoustic movie of the strings of piano and the pianist was playing a 10 note chord you could pick an individual string and play back the sound of just that string.
Here's a video where science YouTuber Steve Mould was loaned some to play around with, showing some of the cool things you can do with them [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QtMTvsi-4Hw
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The loudest vehicles are the mopeds, though. It's almost like they don't have mufflers. I wonder if they are regulated differently?
Problem is many people mount noisy aftermarket ones. They mount back the original one when they have the scheduled inspection.
Having said that, outside of the amount of decibels there are engines that are more annoying. 2-strokes high pitch screamers and single and bi-cylinder with lots of low frequency / bass noise.
And there are models that are probably made to pass homologation but do higher noise outside of the rev range used during homologation/inspection. The Yamaha T-Max is one example. It should be prohibited and all its drivers euthanasied. I am obviously joking for the second part but I have never encountered a decent human being riding one, they only attracts the worse of humanity. Yamaha should be ashamed of that.
I couldn’t wait to leave, which was sad because the winter and autumn was absolutely bliss. We had a great life there.
The mopeds were astoundingly loud though, I’ll never forget it, I had PTSD, I could hear them coming from a ways off and it would make my blood boil before they went past and fuel my insomnia.
What is funny is the mopeds are still plaguing me in a different part of the world now :) they should be banned altogether, they suck.
It also specifically calls out mopeds: https://youtu.be/CTV-wwszGw8?t=680
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bromfiets
The equivalent English translation would be "Pthththththbike".
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTV-wwszGw8
What had been a comfortable speech listening volume is dwarfed by ordinary cars, not even modded boy racer cars speeding, just basic sedans doing the speed limit.
That’s rather anti-human.
The car was probably driven by someone who needed to do a human thing. Drivers are not evil Captain Planet villains.
The anti-human thing is NIBMYs driving everyone out of cities and preventing density.
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The reality is, cities are incredibly noisy due to cars, but also construction work, people shouting, loud music and much more.
No? He drives cars, uses multiple car rental/car shares schemes, often says that it’s not cars he dislikes it’s urban design which leads to car dependency - unsafe for anyone outside a car, no provision for anything other than driving, single family housing zoning leading to everything being too spread out to go anywhere without a car - and that he’s not a ‘cyclist’ and would prefer taking a tram when possible.
The channel is even called “not just bikes” to push back against your kind of mischaracterisation.
It's kind of hard to over emphasize the the damage they've done, specifically as forms of personal transportation (versus more commercial transport).
He does have a video called "The Best Country in the World for Drivers", in which he shows that by reducing the need for cars for most people, actually helps the optimize things for operating a car:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8RRE2rDw4k
And until the ~1920s, societies managed to function pretty well without the streets being taken over by cars:
* https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516129/fighting-traffic/
I don't see why they need to have total priority with-in cities to the extant they currently do.
It's incredibly people-dense so there's definitely some baseline human noise, but I cannot emphasize enough how absolutely dwarfed by cars and delivery trucks it is. Construction work, shouting, music, etc. are almost a non-factor in comparison.
"people shouting" and "loud music" don't even factor.
While not everything can be done on a bike, a lot of people use a car when there is no need to. I can't understand why because cycling is way more enjoyable and in most cases a much faster way to get around town than a car. Especially if you own an e-bike.
I own a car but hardly feel the need to use it. I usually need to buy a full tank of gas once or twice a year.
Cars are by far the biggest noise contributor in a city and tbh i'd like drivers to pay a tax based on max sound a car may make on max engine speed(and if they want to pay less tax, speed should be physically limited to max 100km/h or something similar based on gps. But that's just a fantasy
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1: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15117726/faking-it-en...
Yeah loud engines and music (and phone calls!) from cars is annoying, but that’s not where most of the sound comes from.
It is just tires on the asphalt that is so loud. I don’t know if this is due to how heavy American cars have gotten or changing roads from concrete to asphalt, but it has become quite unbearable.
The rise of e-bikes and personal mobility scooters has helped cut down on the noise somewhat, but I don’t know what you do about regular car noise (other than banning cars).
Also, whatever vehicle designer that decided the horn should honk whenever the car locks — you are on the top of my list!
This should be illegal. I sort of get it 30 years ago when aftermarket & OEM car alarms were a new thing, but that's it's still acceptable in 2023 is asinine.
No artificial sound should be allowed when locking or unlocking a car. Maybe flashing the headlights at most.
I recommend never visiting Ecuador. Car alarms (false alarms), lock, and unlock sounds are an all day thing.
If you think America is bad you ain’t seen nothing yet.
My last sedan would beep when you hit the lock button twice, which was great because I could lock it without being annoying but I could also use a beacon to find it in a parking lot. Now, my new RAV4 makes the tiniest little blip no matter how you lock it, it's only audible from a few feet away, so I can never find it in a parking lot.