Excellent point. A single standard noise for “I’m a silent electric vehicle slowly going forward” and a different standard noise for "“I’m a vehicle of nay kind going backward” would be best.
But after the ubiquitous beeping on trucks for 20-30 years now there’s a new lower-pitched sort of growling BRRRRP noise many of then make instead. Why? All the construction folks had become inured to the continuous sound of beeping on jobsites because somebody is always backing up somewhere and it just became part of the general background noise of “I’m at work”.
White noise reverse alarms are easier to locate and don’t need to be as loud. Here’s an old Tom Scott video on the subject, but while trying to find it, I see there’s a ton of videos about it now.
Also, I don’t know if this is the case in the alarms Tom was talking about, but it seems these (all? some?) white noise reverse alarms are quite directional so it’s really just the people that need to hear it that can hear it and the rest of the people aren’t looking around trying to figure out if there’s a truck about to hit them or if it’s that bulldozer around the corner.
I bought a basic Lexus years ago. When I asked if they had stick shift, they had instead a “shift stick mode” which was automatic, but the driver could basically pretend to depress the clutch and busy his right hand.
Yeah seems like a lot of cars have that manual automatic shift mode now, every Kia I’ve driven has had it. I always read that you try it once and never worry with it again, that’s about right in my experience. Nothing like driving a manual and no real reason to use it.
Ehh, my wife’s Outback with the CVT has a manual mode (and flappy paddles!). I use it to “downshift” to a lower ratio and slow down without the brakes when I’m descending a hill sometimes. That’s the only time I don’t think less of it for pretending it has distinct gears.
We had an old station wagon that had a backup beeper. There are kits to add it to any car by connected one of the backup lights. I loved the idea, I envisioned selling these with an infomercial that starts with brief shots of little kids, dogs, and grandma about to be run over by a car backing up. And then the annoying guy tells you how to avoid that tragedy with the miraculous backup beeper! But for some reason my wife and neighbors hated the thing, and I disabled the feature when the threats got serious enough.
