[basil-rash]

By far the worst offenders when it comes to neighborhood car sound are EV’s. They have decided across the board to blast the most bone chilling drone imaginable every time they are backing up a driveway or driving at low speed – you know, the kind of thing that happens in neighborhoods all the time.

The tone itself is the worst part. It’s as if it was specifically engineered by top audio scientists to be as repulsive as possible (that’s probably exactly what happened), then they turned the volume dial up to 11 so it’s still grating even in your house several doors down. I believe Tesla led the charge here, but now they’re all equally guilty of disturbing the peace and wanton noise pollution.

Just play a nice v8 sound at a reasonable volume for gosh sake!

[qrohlf]

There’s some regulation here to contend with that mandates these EV sounds have to include a 1khz-4khz tone which is probably what you’re noticing since it’s on the higher end of the usual urban audioscape. The Verge did an interesting piece on this recently – https://www.theverge.com/24182348/ev-sounds-low-speed-survey...

[hollerith]

I like the hissing sound that some delivery trucks started making about a decade ago.

Experiments show that people can determine the direction of a hiss (a sound composed of many frequencies) better than a beep or a pure tone.