Artifical noise on your i3?

[TomMoloughney]

There has been a lot of "noise" made about whether or not quiet electric cars need artificial noise added to them for safety purposes. I don't believe it's necessary but I'd like to know what your thoughts are on it. Would you like artificial noise on your i3 or other EV.

Please take a minute to vote on the poll I've created a the link below. Thanks. I'll post the results here once the poll closes.

http://bmwi3.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-silence-of-cars.html

 

[Plug]

Interesting blog post. Personally I'll be really disapointed if there is an artificial noise that can't be turned off but I'm not expecting that to be the case in the UK despite it being exactly the type of thing that the government can't help but meddle with.

I asked 'iGenius' a question about this the other day and got an encouraging reply. Hopefully it's accurate !

 

[Lolotte]

What is "iGenius"?

I though the noise thing was an option, what they called an acoustic protection for pedestrian...
But maybe not in the end! Or maybe it depends of the safety laws the country is on regarding vehicles...

 

[Waitingi3]

I like the way the Chevy Spark EV handles this. If you pull on the headlight switch to flash the high beam then a soft pedestrian horn sounds. Linking the flashing light to the noise makes a whole lot of sense.

 

[ChrisC]

The Chevy Volt did that in the first model year and I HATED IT. It meant that whenever I flashed my brights at someone ("hey your lights are off") then cars closer to me would wonder why I was honking at them. HATED IT. Fortunately they fixed that in later model year Volts, with a separate stalk-end button for ped alert.

This issue made it into my check list (link below)

The Spark probably has it coupled to the brights to keep costs down.