Vroom! Leccy cars get loud
Greenbang always secretly wanted to be a boy racer, revving suped up custom versions of really rather rubbish cars with fat exhaust pipes and ginormous spoilers round the car park at Netto, doing burn-ups and handbrake turns. It was something about the noise emanating from exhausts the size of a dustbin that did it.
In these days of electric and hybrid fuel cars there’s not much chance of getting that kind of petrol-fuelled racket out of your Toyota Prius. Until now, that is.
The engineers at Lotus have developed technology to make electric cars louder. Not so you can now go and join the local teenagers down at the Netto car park, but because they fear electric cars are so quiet they are dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists, who can’t hear them coming.
The Lotus engineers, quite possibly taking a leaf out of the book of a generation of kids who fixed a piece of card by the spokes of their bicycles in the, frankly, misguided hope it would then sound like a motorbike, have come up with a waterproof speaker that sits under the bonnet of electric and hybrid fuel cars.
Dubbed ‘Safe & Sound’, the clever little speaker even changes its loudness and pitch in time with the car’s speed. Vroom, vroom!
More from the Lotus media centre here.
