It will be one of the most critical issues for the automotive industry in the next three years: the sound of electric cars (EV) and hybrids (HEV). If you own a car, a motorcycle or a spaceship, it’s impossible that you never heard about the friendly Nissan LEAF, the sexy Fisker Karma or the worldwide well-known Toyota Prius. These will be the cars of our future, a new industrial mashup made of design, innovation and green technology.

This is surely nice, but electric and hybrid vehicles have a huge problem: they’re quiet. Too quiet. A conventional combustion-engine vehicle when stationery emits a sound of 50 dB, while the noise generated by an electric one is 0 dB. At a speed of 12 km/hr the conventional car is at 60 dB, the electric car is at 50 dB. When moving at a speed bigger than 20 km/hr, the intensity of the emitted sound is the same for all the vehicles, due to the friction with the ground. The reduced sound signature of hybrid and electric cars introduce a safety concern to cyclists and pedestrians, because they hardly detect vehicles at low speeds. This problem becomes more dramatic for blind and visually impaired pedestrians, who use auditory informations, like noise generated by vehicles, to localize streets, crossroads and make decisions in order to move safely.

I and Sara are working in Lorelei with FIAMM, world leader in the market of acoustic devices, for the development of a solution to the problem of quiet electric cars. Our mission: to guarantee the safety on the roads, but not only…

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