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Sssh, Hybrid approaching.

Posted on: Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 5:31 am by: sahail
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Relaxing in your garden is what the weekends were made for. The stress and strain of a week and the work involved in it can be washed away by a few hours in the serenity and calm of your garden. Birds tweeting and the wind rustling through the tress, it really doesn’t get much better than this…

And then a car drives by. In many parts of the developed world cars are becoming more common, no matter where you live. This means that even if you live in a prestigious gated community you can still be sitting there on a Sunday morning, on your sun lounge, slow-baking in the sun, when some guy across the street decides that is the perfect time to test the revs on his weekend sports car.

The noises from cars are not limited to the daylight hours. Have you ever gotten ready for bed extra early because you need to put in the hours, and, just as you turn the lights out and begin to drift the sound of a car pulling into a drive jolts you awake? This is a common occurrence nowadays. Forgetting city dwellers (who have to live with transport noise), the modern world on the whole has become a place filled with engine noise.

And then there is the worsening problem of highly modified or ‘jazzed-up’ vehicles. In some neighbourhoods the poor residents are subjected to the growl of these beasts throughout the day. Some poor souls even live nearby the big roads that the (invariably young) drivers of these vehicles choose to adopt as their drag strips.

Engine noise has become worse in the last decade or so. But then the hybrid car came along, with its promise of quieter motoring happily delivered, and the portion of the world that wished for a more relaxed life breathed a collective sigh of relief.

Hybrid motoring has indeed offered hope for the future when it comes to motoring noise. Compared to conventional engines there really is no contest, with the sleek drive of a hybrid producing a vastly reduced sound than its noisier cousin.

But this near silence has become, alas, a major talking point, and not in a good way. Recently, blind people have been voicing their concerns about the lack of noise hybrids make. This, they say, compromises their safety on the street.

The National Federation of the Blind’s Committee on Automotive and Pedestrian Safety undertook a test of the technology and its sound levels. The results were not so hot. While the test was not as scientific as it could have been (the blind subjects basically stood around in car parks and on sidewalks listening out for car noise) it certainly threw up clear concerns about the safety of this particular group of citizens.

The group couldn’t hear the hybrid cars as they passed. Some members of the group even asked if the test had started after a vehicle had driven by.

With hybrid cars increasing in popularity, and the technology that drives the machines undergoing almost weekly developments, the issue clearly needs addressing. In addition to the blind, for example, there is at least one other vulnerable group when it comes to road safety.

Children are of course, a vulnerable section of the population when it comes to road safety. Watch a group of these playing near a road and listening out for cars is the last thing on their mind, never mind watching out for a virtually silent vehicle.

So what to do? Well, some people think that the hybrid car should announce itself. What this means is that rather than be virtually silent, the cars that carry this technology should have a sound all of their own. This way people will know they are approaching and can act accordingly. Now, this is an interesting subject. Watch any futuristic movie and cars talk, play music, sound out warning signals, offer a host of options, in fact, to warn pedestrians that they are coming.

I think that this could be handled much better than that. But I am not sure how. Maybe it is one for future discussion, but there must be some way to alert people that a hybrid is approaching with a unique, non-obtrusive, sophisticated, and non-grating sound. Not a tall order for the industry, surely?