I have been on walking trails and state park trails that have one annoying feature- they are located near highways or interstate. If all the vehicles, cars and trucks, were EVs would there still be a ‘significant’ amount of road noise? Would it be noticeably quieter or just as noisy?
Anything car sized traveling fast is still going to make noise. It should be quieter but how much quieter will depend on how fast typical traffic moves and what sorts of vehicles are displaced. And if anybody is blasting music at high volume, it won’t matter if the vehicle is electric or not.
Tyre noise and aerodynamic noise are the same. EVs are maybe half as noisy as ICE. The noise spectrum is different and that makes comparison harder. EVs are more simple noise. ICE have the characteristic noise of firing cylinders in their various combinations. That yields much more noise in narrow frequency bands
I live about a kilometre from a freeway. What I find particularly annoying is not the overall sound of ICE cars, but the occasional obnoxiously loud one. They cut though the background. Trucks can be worse than anything.
It isn’t hard to make an ICE pretty quiet. The market generally doesn’t reward it. You don’t see options on cars for even quieter noise. But you do see options for performance exhausts and some with an optional loud button.
Noticeably quieter. I don’t think that can be disputed.
I live a fair bit from a highway coming into town (downhill grade) and at night we can hear the trucks coming into town (downshifting but no jake brakes allowed), leaving town, along with all the other ICEs gunning it up the grade. The “tuner” cars and motos are so annoying. I bet we never hear an EV.
I have many motos and I know the difference between stock exhaust and all the horrible aftermarket stuff. Motorcycles, including Harleys, don’t have to be loud.
I know this is anecdotal, but we never hear just tire noise. That noise doesn’t reach us.
Not what I worked on in my car audio career, but it was my understanding that EV’s were required to add sounds so that animals and blind people would be more aware of their presence.
I am aware of this only because their is an extra speaker mounted at the front of the EV’s I worked and when it had issues people would ask me about it. Not mine I would tell them, I only did the music and interior cabin noise control systems.
So this would “add” a little to the road noise aspect.
This is true.
But …
All the fake noise cuts off at about 15mph. By then the tire & wind noise is enough to announce their presence to peds. So there won’t be any fake noise added to boulevard or highway traffic.
The added noise is only at low parking lot speeds and backing up. On the road, EVs have tire noise and aerodynamic noise. The aero noise is less for EVs for efficiency purposes. The EV wheels and tires are also optimized for efficiency. Probably a wash on tire noise since EVs are heavier than equivalent IC and the larger size and squish balance the lower rolling resistance.
Ninja’d
Are they quieter on the inside than ICE vehicles? Seems like they could be, since a lot of interior noise comes from the jackhammer warfare taking place just beyond the dashboard.
My latest ride has noise cancelling built in via the cabin speakers. It works surprisingly well, so maybe engine noise isn’t a big thing anymore.
And if the manufacturer makes the fake noise too obnoxious to the driver, they turn it off, then it’s all but silent all of the time. There are plenty of times when I’m in my subdivision following someone walking or riding their bike down the middle of the road with no idea that I’m right behind them. My previous EV, at least the US version of it, didn’t allow you to turn it off, so I installed a button on my dashboard that toggled it. In that car, in those situations, I’d turn the noise back on. My current car has a toggle, but it’s multiple screens deep so it just stays off and I drive behind them, slowly.
Yes, absolutely. If you have a car that will let you do this, you can put it in neutral and shut off the engine while at speed. You’d be surprised at how much quieter it is. Just remember it has to be in neutral to restart the engine.
A few years ago, I was talking to someone I know about EV cars and I mentioned the only real noise is road noise. He works at 3M and said they have a team just working on quieter tires for EVs since it’s one of the only, and probably the most prominent, exterior noise you hear in the cabin. They’re also working on improving the sound dampening ability of the insulation.
It doesn’t hurt that engines are quieter than they used to be as well.
Off topic, so I’m not looking for an answer here, but I wonder how many car repairs get delayed because the driver doesn’t hear them. With cars that are more soundproof and have built in noise canceling, the driver might not notice (or more easily ignore) things like a rusting exhaust or a failing wheel bearing or brakes that are starting to squeal, even a low tire on a car without a TPMS, ie things that won’t turn on a warning light, but generally rely on the driver hearing the noise and taking it to a mechanic.
I’ve seen ads for luxury cars that emphasize how quiet they are inside, but that could be from better sound insulation, rather than less engine noise to begin with (or, likely, a combination of the two).
Strangely, I had the opposite experience living within a couple of kilometers of a really large freeway (about 12 lanes in that area). I think the real answer is that it depends on the vehicle and on its speed. Large trucks, like those hauling semi-trailers, can be obnoxiously loud, and so can motorcycles and hot rods with tin can mufflers.
But in the absence of hill-climbing, at high speeds (say 60-70 mph) normal cars produce a surprising amount of tire noise. When we lived within hearing distance of that freeway, there was usually a constant background drone. The only time it was completely quiet was, ironically, during periods of maximum traffic in morning and afternoon rush hour. The reason? The highway was congested and everything was moving relatively slowly.
So I conclude that if everyone drove an electric passenger car, those within hearing range of a busy high-speed freeway would still hear the drone of tire noise and the sound of big trucks.
I think it’s both. My beloved old Chevrolet Caprice, while not a luxury car, was the high end of the Chevrolet line at the time. I remember driving a friend around when I first got the car and, when stopped at a light, he remarked how remarkable it was that there were eight cylinders firing up front, because you literally couldn’t hear a thing except the gentle hiss of the air conditioning.
The amount of sound insulation in the car does make a big difference on how loud it is on the inside. One of the criticisms of the Tesla Model 3 when it first came out was that it was surprisingly loud for an EV. The amount of road noise on the inside can be high. I can tell the difference between summer and winter tires, and the roads in Washington and Oregon where particularly loud, while Idaho was very quiet.
Cruising at 65 on a calm day the interior of my 2000 Suburban is quieter than my Model 3. Climbing up to the Eisenhower tunnel with a full load and the Suburban is at redline in 2nd gear, the Suburban is much louder than the Model 3. Similar if there is a strong wind. In those cases the engine noise or wind noise from the less aerodynamic Suburban overcome the extra road noise in the Model 3.
The Tesla Model X is quieter in all conditions than either the Model 3 or Suburban.
I have one of the early Tesla Model 3’s. At the time there was an aftermarket kit, a second row of foam/rubber strip around the doorways to create double insulation, similar to quieter premium vehicles. Allegedly it cut the road noise significantly - inside. The vehicle as delivered had a foam lining inside the tires covering the tread area, also to reduce tire noise - with no engine to drown it out, the most noticeable noise is tire noise. (And goes up significantly with snow tires, which also don’t have the foam lining).
As for weight, my Tesla is about 4100lb and my BMW (328GT) was about 3800lb. So not a significant difference, but it’s no Toyota Corolla.
It also does not have the low speed noise, which was mandated for new cars after I bought my car. It does not even have the speaker, I believe. IIRC the noise was programmable with Teslas that had it, which allowed for some humorous creativity. It was intended for settings like parking lots, where a lot of pedestrian and vehicle traffic mingles.
I knew someone who lived a few blocks from the 401, a 16-lane expressway through Toronto. Even with the tall concrete barriers, you could hear the traffic going by over 500 feet away, and it seemed to be mostly tire noise.