Kindly provided in a previous post
D'oh! I followed the second link in that message, but not the first. Ta for highlighting.
I’d love someone to test but I swear many ice cars are dead quiet
Yeah, actually in the TRL study that
@Rirawin kindly shared, it said that at 7-8km/h the difference between ICE vehicles and EVs/hybrids was only 1dB(A). In the conclusion the authors write "[t]here are current model ICE vehicles on the market which are comparable in noise level to E/HE vehicles." That study seems pretty cool - I'm glad that they were thinking about this all the way back in 2011.
Pedestrians are 40 per cent more likely to be hit by a hybrid or electric car
The RNIB are citing Guide Dogs For The Blind, and their link no longer resolves. I suspect it's coming from the TRL study, which says that EVs present a 1.4x risk exposure in comparison to ICE vehicles. This test was done by playing back audio samples to a small number of subjects (10) who had never encountered electric vehicles other than milk floats and mobility scooters, and were not representative of the population of visually-impaired people. Maybe it would be different when folks are more familiar with EVs? The study used response times to measure risk. If someone is unsure
what a noise is, they're going to take longer to press the button to indicate that they've heard the thing. I also wonder what the baseline there is - 40% more of a big number is very different to 40% more of a number that was small to begin with.
The TRL study says that at 7-8km/h EVs are 3db(A) louder than ambient noise, and that adults with normal hearing would be able to perceive that difference. Presumably that doesn't hold
below 7km/h. From first principles, it stands to reason that parking manoeuvres are a genuine case when EVs would be less audible. However, the study says "the possibility of increased risk exposure posed by vehicles pulling away from rest is significantly less than that when the vehicles are passing by at steady speed." It also shows that participants were equally able to identify an EV parking when reversing as they were ICE vehicles, and only 10 percentage points less able to identify one parking in a forwards motion (90% versus 100% for ICE). I wouldn't have guessed that. Again though, it was a small, unrepresentative sample.
If EVs are the future, I wonder if rather than fitting
every new car with what could uncharitably be considered a 'noise pollution device', it'd be more sensible to make some sort of EV-detecting hearing aid. If
21,000 people register blind in the UK each year, and
2,100,000 cars are sold per year in the UK, then a solution that targets those who are impaired would need to be more than 100 times costlier in order to
not make more sense. I've no idea how much an AVAS costs, or how much a hitherto-uninvented 'EV-alerting' system would cost.
Definitely seems that RNIB and similar are campaigning for this vociferously, and if there's a
genuine increased risk (
some academics dispute this, although I couldn't find any relevant published research), then that's fair enough. I'd kinda figured that if my MYP
ever arrives, it'd have it.
