Why Are Electric Cars So Quiet?

Post date: 23-Apr-2020 12:26:52

hello it's the middle of winter in New York and it's dark and the daylight hours a few and I find myself daydreaming back to blue skies and sunny locations from earlier last year one place. I was fortunate to go was the beautiful Mediterranean island of Capri off the coast of mainland Italy famous for Hollywood celebrity film festivals each year and a holiday resort since Roman times.

But am I remembering it right from the depths of a US winter or was it a bit more like this my feeling is that driving an electric car can sensitize you a bit more to vehicle noise now I haven't yet been able to convincingly capture on film how quiet are ionic electric car is but despite of my efforts of being unable to do that it is quite clear when you go

somewhere like Capri where there's a lot of kind of three cylinder engines and loads and loads of vehicles just going about servicing.

All the various hotels restaurants shops and tourists getting around the island that they do make an awful lot of noise and that that does spoil the feeling of being in a kind of beautiful island paradise what would this island have been like if most of the cars had been sort of zero emission quiet electric vehicles might it have sounded a bit like this there's not only of course the noise from the vehicles and the quieter sounds of electric cars electric vehicles.

It's also about health and smell particularly on the slower ferry on the way out to Capri the smell of the fuel being burnt was unbearable and the air was almost unbreathable it was really very unpleasant the returned hydrofoil the quicker option for getting back to the mainland was a bit better but still there was a smell in the air of the field being combusted what are your experience.

This year have you been to beautiful islands where there's a lot of zero emission vehicles a lot of electric vehicles or other kind of powered vehicles that make it a bit of a nicer you know sound and air quality and so on I'd love to hear about them I still would actually like to try and pull together say a convoy of three or four electric cars with three or four petrol or diesel cars just to kind of compare the noise.

Maybe with the decibel meter maybe with some bystanders watching it what do you think is that doable in the US is it possible to pull that kind of arrangement together and I think I've also realized why there aren't any videos online of a demonstration side-by-side of electric with non electric vehicles and noises that they make if you think about it apart from Tesla.

Most of the vehicle makers sell both electric and non electric vehicles and if they were going to pull together a demo of this kind they would obviously want their own brand vehicles in it not someone elses so then they would be demonstrating to you that the vehicles that by the way they also sell are much noisier than electric cars and I don't think that would be very good PR for them but who knows I also wanted to say that zero tailpipe is now on twitter at zero tailpipe.