Zoomi Life

You can thank the lawyers for this concept. Chevrolet’s new Volt, the hybrid-EV coming out next year, will have “car sounds” added. Yep, the worry that blind or deaf people won’t hear it (yeah, they said “deaf people won’t hear it”–you can’t make this stuff up) and will get hit by a motorist, who will in turn sue Chevy for making a car that’s too quiet, caused the thinkers at General Motors to come up with a sound-producing speaker for the car.

Obviously, they didn’t pay attention to the other noises cars make: like horns, tires on the roadway, 1500 decibel speakers pumping out Fitty-Cent, and so forth. Lucky for us, the Volt won’t sound like a souped up Camaro or anything, but apparently more Star-Trekkish.

Great, the nerds figured out how to take a real car that happens to be electric and make it nerdy anyway.

On the up side, it’s apparently controllable by the driver, so it can be turned on and off. I expect to quickly see customer-hacks of this doing everything BUT alerting people that the car is coming. I know I’d be tempted to ad a loop-recording for the speaker that I can change once a while. Imagine driving around one day sounding like a broken down tractor and the next sounding like a hoot-owl on a calm night? I expect my neighbor would pipe porno music through his…

OK, what about blind people? Unfortunately, I don’t personally know any I can poll, so I had to make a guess. They probably hear cars, but I’d think they can hear much better than we can and are a little more aware of the sounds around them. Plus they have those cool dogs, which we all know are super-human in hearing abilities. Lucky for blind people, my “bark at ghosts” canines aren’t trained seeing-eye dogs.

Here’s how the sound is described by Frank Weber, GM’s E-Flex vehicle line executive (what the heck kinda title is that??): “highly technical, like when on Spaceship Enterprise you hear the doors close, or use the transporter.” Uhh… OK, those are really sci-fi sounds there, buddy. Maybe this car will sound like the Jetson’s “Bbbbbbbmmmpppppppppppp” flier.

He also used words like “highly pleasing” and “almost imperceptible” in his description. Both are relative terms, I’d like to point out. What you find to be “highly pleasing” might, to me, sound like Celine Dion.

There are also rumors that the car will have some kind of artificial “feedback” to make it feel more like a regular car in acceleration and tactile movement. This could be interesting as well. I mean, the joystick on my nephew’s PS/3 has “tactile feedback” too. I don’t think I want the steering wheel of my car vibrating every time I take a hit. This could have advantages, tough. Imagine how cool it’d be to drive your car by playing your wireless Guitar Hero II guitar. I’d face paint like Gene Simmons just to ad to the effect.

I don’t know if you can tell, but I’m pretty dubious about this whole concept. At first, it was really great to see a “normal” car put out by a big-time car company that had most of what I’d expect from today’s EV. Now they’re apparently falling for all the techno-hype and going dork. Sigh