In this blog: The European Parliament decided EVs must make some noise for pedestrians safety, especially visually impaired people.It's kind of a follow up to our blog Let's just "stick" some noise into the EVs (back than the EN version of eCars.bg was still to come). The difference is that now MEPs decision says from 2019 on all EVs must emit a noise similar to the one coming from the ICE vehicles...
The lobbyists are naturally happy about the change. Are they right to do so? Is there a reason to consider EVs threaten pedestrains lives, being particularly dangerous to the people having visual or hearing disabilities?
I can answer some of these questions from personal experience. I'm driving an EV from the beginning ot 2014. In almost four months now I've never been in a situation to endanger someone's life.
A single vehicle or experience is not enough to make conclusions of course. What I also know, however, is that there's more than 400,000 EVs around the world now, but have you ever heard of hordes of EVs hitting pedestrians?
One other thing I know as well for sure now is that almost no one on the streets hears the artificial sound that my Renault Twizy emits. It's just useless. Same with the electric Kangoo. But it's not the cars' fault. It's just too noisy, mostly from the ICE vehicles around. I admit you can here and old diesel bus a block away, though...
Wait, it's getting even more controversial. MEPs dediced also that the ICE vehicles noise should be lowered even more. Great, but as it was already commented in eCars.bg's forum, there's already very silent ICE models on the market. These cars are totally different than the ones we've driven 20 years ago.
OK, so we're making ICE's quiters and EVs louder, right? Isn't it odd? Maybe one day EVs will be louder than ICEs?!? Then, in turn, MEPs may just decide to get the old ICE buzz back into the town, who knows?
We are predestrians as well. And we do respect disabled people. That's why we can't support this as a mandatory measure. If we want to entrust our responsibility for disabled people to an artificial noise, we're simply doing an artifical job.
It is also expected that the European Council will seal this controversial affair which says:
So-called 'Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems' requirements shall ensure that only adequate sound generating devices are used which will also lead to a harmonisation of the applied technology. The fitting as such will be mandatory for all Electric and hybrid electric vehicles after a transitional period of 5 years. This will increase road safety and undoubtedly help avoiding road-accident injuries.
Did you just say harmonisation? Umm, we haven't heard of such that regulates the sound of the engines. Image all new EVs buzzing alike at the streets! Why not then have all the car companies unite and produce just one car? Why would we need more?!? Indeed, ain't it weird?
Well these are the things we wanted to share about the "noisy EVs" case. Curious what you think about it?
