Skip to main content

Fake engine sound makes EVs safer, fun to drive

Forthcoming legislation in the USA, EU and Japan will require that all electric vehicles emit an alert sound at lower speeds in an effort to prevent the increasing number of accidents where pedestrians are hit by silent electric vehicles.
September 10, 2013 Read time: 1 min
Forthcoming legislation in the USA, EU and Japan will require that all electric vehicles emit an alert sound at lower speeds in an effort to prevent the increasing number of accidents where pedestrians are hit by silent electric vehicles.

Swedish company 7478 SoundRacer has developed EValert, an electronic engine sound product, to give a realistic sound indicating if the vehicle is idling, accelerating, decelerating or cruising. The different sound characters and sound volume are determined from information about the actual speed of the vehicle.

Says Kenneth Palmestål of SoundRacer: "SoundRacer is to our knowledge the only developer of EValert sound systems that use real engine sounds. After studying several reports we are convinced that real engine sounds will be less disturbing and have better alerting effect than other sounds.”

The company has developed two versions of the device; the acoustic vehicle alerting system (AVAS) which enables electric vehicles to meet the coming legislation; and  one which provides real engine sounds  and even lets the driver change from the sound of a Ferrari V12 to a Mustang V8 with the press of a button.

For more information on companies in this article

Related Content

  • ITS World Congress debates perceptions of enforcement
    December 4, 2012
    The technical programme of this year’s ITS World Congress in Vienna includes a special session on the image of enforcement. ITS International examines the scale of the problem and what can be done about it. Debate on the merits and difficulties of enforcing speed limits appears centred on a conflict of principles. Put very simply, local communities, people living close to busy or hazardous roads, want to see traffic speeds calmed. Drivers on those roads, on the whole, want their principle of freedom to be m
  • APA supports automated work zone speed enforcement
    July 17, 2015
    A trade association representing the highway construction industry strongly supports automated enforcement of speed limits in work zones and Maryland's experience with a similarly designed program has had very good results, the association head has told a joint Pennsylvania House and Senate committee. According to PennDOT, 24 people were killed in work-zone crashes in 2014, eight more than in 2013. Additionally, there were 1,841 crashes in work zones last year, a slight decrease from the 1,851 crashes
  • GPS delivers accurate journey time data for UTC
    January 27, 2012
    A new solution developed as a consequence of the UK's Freeflow project fuses GPS and UTC loop data to give more accurate predictions of journey times, benefting network managers and travellers alike. By Matt Cowley and Gareth Jones, Trakm8 and John Polak and Rajesh Krishnan, Imperial College London
  • Mobile communications could revolutionise traffic management
    February 1, 2012
    Rudolf Mietzner looks at how machine-to-machine technologies and applications will affect the automotive sector in the coming years