Quiet kills

John Cox

By Buster McNutt

Just when you thought you’d heard everything — unless of course you were walking down the road and one of those new electric cars was “sneaking up” behind you at just the moment your left brain decided that it, along with right brain and rest of body including all vital organs would just veer to the left and mosey on over to the other side of the road. … Well, you get the picture. What you can’t hear can hurt you. It would be sad if what you didn’t hear (electric car) turned out to be the last thing you ever didn’t hear, or heard for that matter. Quiet kills — it’s that simple.

Think about it. As soon as you are born, the first sound you hear is yourself crying, since the doctor just smacked your bottom for some medical reason that I believe roughly translates into “because he can.” Then life gets progressively, and rightfully, more noisy. You learn your name (an important life skill) because you hear somebody saying it. You learn not to see how many of Mommy’s bobbie pins you can put in the electrical socket because somebody screamed at you. (I can only wish someone had done that for me!). And it goes on. Most of life’s great learning lessons, moments of joy, and potential life saving experiences, all have one thing in common — noise. On the other side, when you die it gets real quiet. To recap — noise good, quiet bad. There are exceptions — nagging spouses, rap “music” and Popsicle trucks come to mind. Otherwise, noise is a good thing. Were this not true, people who were born deaf or had lost their hearing would not be called “challenged.” If this was a good thing they would be called “gifted.” I’m pretty sure if I were so gifted, I would want to make sure that I kept the receipt, since I’d be returning that gift!

Other than disease, almost everything that is life-threatening if it impacts our bodies makes noise. Bullets, soccer mobs, pit bulls, and, traditionally, automobiles, make noise to let you know they are (a) on the way, and (b) you might better get out of that way. Not so electric cars. Okay, bicycles are like that, too, but I don’t know that there are all that many bike/pedestrian fatalities unless maybe the pedestrian had a really bad allergy to spandex.

It’s not the deaf pedestrians who have a problem with electric cars being too quiet. (Tell me you didn’t need a minute to think about that). It’s the blind people that are most at risk, because their ears actually are their eyes in this regard, which makes you wonder if Visine makes a special product for sight challenged ears … okay, fine, it makes me wonder that.

At speeds above 20 mph electric cars do make noise from their tires, flapping “save the whales” bumper stickers, and laughter from any Bubba driven pickups in opposite lanes. Unfortunately, most car/pedestrian impacts occur at less than 20 mph when electric cars make no sound. “Unfortunately” being one of those strange terms, since I’m thinking I’d way rather get hit by a 5 mph electric car than the previously mentioned 30 mph, three-ton Bubbamobile.

So, before the government mandates a solution (think “health care reform”), maybe we should figure this out ourselves. This is essentially a no-brainer for any American male over 40.

We wanted our cars to be as loud as possible — forget 20 mph, we’re talking from buried speedometer at one end, to backing into the car hop spot at the local burger stand. “Rumble” was our mantra. Thrush mufflers with the ticked off woodpecker decals were the tribal signs of choice. Great if it made you go faster — even greater if it made you sound better. And I could give you all the scientific/anthropological coming-of-age psycho-babble of why this was so important to the American male, but mostly it was all about chicks dug loud cars, and by extension, the cool guys that drove them.

Well, the girl’s daddies didn’t like what they saw and/or remembered from their past, so they started buying family cars with air conditioning and high-end stereos. Girls like a lot of things, but sweating is not one of them. Up went the windows, down went the noise levels. Quiet was now a good thing. When girls started losing interest in noisy cars, eventually, so did the guys. Coincidence? I don’t think so. Not the real guys at first — it started with the debate/chess team guys, the Vespa scooter guys, the tape-on-their-glasses-slide rules-in-their-back-pocket guys. … Then it spread to the student managers/towel boys on the football/basketball teams, then on to the boys in the audio-visual club, and then one-by-one the cool guys started noticing that Brylcreem and ninety degree temperatures equaled massive oil slicks and forehead pimples. … And then the uncool guys in the A/C cars stared getting dates with the cool girls who wanted to remain that way. It took maybe ten years, but the loud car era was mostly over. Quiet was now good.

So, in the interest of pedestrian safety, we need to bring back a reasonable level of automotive noise for electric cars. I’m thinking that at speeds under 20 mph, the windows automatically roll down. That way pedestrians could hear the Yani CD’s/I-Pods, the slurping of the McDonalds Macho-Latte coffee, the tippy-tappy texting sounds, and all the other internal vehicle sounds associated with the kinds of people who would drive electric cars. It’s not their faults — it’s probably in the genes — their dads probably were on the debate/chess teams, picked up their share of sweaty towels in locker rooms, ran 16mm projectors showing “I Am Joe’s Digestive System” in classrooms across America, and probably, in the backs of their wallets, have faded pictures of red motor scooters. Nature can be so cruel.

Or, we could collectively have what once was referred to as “an attack of better sense” and realize that electric cars, quiet or otherwise, are a silly, silly idea. They have to be recharged nightly from an electrical outlet, and, here in the South, we generate our electricity from good old dirty coal. I’m told the amount of coal-generated electricity needed to fully recharge an electric car creates an amount of pollution roughly equivalent to driving a 1961 Buick Electra 225 the length of an average driveway, which just happens to be 347 percent more pollution than is allowed for a new gasoline powered vehicle driving 120 miles which is, you guessed it, the range of a fully charged electric vehicle!

It’s time to quit keeping quiet about quiet cars. Or maybe the next sound you don’t hear. ... •