The Future of Sound Effects for Electric Vehicles
Blade Runner, originally uploaded by bradfordcox
One source of worry that the seemingly perfect electric car has come across over the years is its ultra quiet nature. At first, the thought of a vehicle making absolutely no sound, sounds great. That is until you go to cross the street with a handful of grocery bags and a dark pair of sunglasses… blam! You never even saw that EV (Electric Vehicle) coming, or I should say… heard it coming.
The biggest concern for the electric vehicle, is that neither people or animals will be able to hear them coming. This is especially of concern for handicapped pedestrians with poor hearing and/or eyesight. Well, it just so happens that the solution is just as simple as pumping out the tune of a vehicle from the cult movie classic, Blade Runner, over the loud speaker.
It probably never occurred to anyone that perhaps those really cool jet sounds that futuristic cars made in movies for the past 50 years, were nothing more than sound effects designed to keep pedestrians from being run over. Nissan has been playing around with this idea for awhile now, and has deemed that the sound effects from the movie, Blade Runner, were the most appropriate for their Leaf EV.
As you can imagine, such an idea would open a host of other possibilities for electric cars, such as the roar of a big block 427, the swoosh of a 757 airliner, or perhaps even the scream of the Star Wars Millennium Falcon setting into hyper-speed. Remember those kids who used to tape playing cards to their bicycle spokes, so it sounded like a motorcycle (or more like a 2-cycle moped)? Well, it’s the same idea, but only for a car.
Some have even proposed that an EV’s sound effects could be as interchangeable as downloading a new ring tone for a cell phone. Perhaps one day you feel like pretending your driving an F1 supercar, but the next day you’d rather pretend your Chauffeuring Captain Kirk aboard the Starship Enterprise. The possibilities would be as endless as…
Your worst nightmare!
