Are Hybrids Too Quiet? - Wheels - Autos - New York Times Blog
Are Hybrids Too Quiet? - Wheels - Autos - New York Times Blog By RICHARD S. CHANGIt happened again last Friday. I was walking with two friends to our car in a parking garage when I got a strange feeling that we were being followed. When I turned my head, I saw the front slope of a Toyota Prius, which was rolling quietly a few feet behind us.
It only freaked me out a little before I stepped aside. Some people haven’t been so lucky:
[Jana] Littrell, who is blind, was walking through a bank parking lot in the East Bay town of Albany a year ago when her foot was run over by a Toyota Prius backing out of a parking space. She wasn’t injured and the driver apologized effusively, she recalled. But the experience shook her up.
“It has definitely put me more on my guard,” said Littrell, who teaches Braille to newly blind adults. “But I don’t know how much good that’s going to do me if I can’t hear the car coming.”
Hybrid cars run solely on their electric motors at low speeds, which means they are virtually silent to pedestrians. For anyone who’s ever been in a hybrid (or electric car), the silence is one of the first things you’re aware of.
According to The Associated Press, early results from an ongoing study at the University of California-Riverside found that “hybrids operating at slow speeds must be 40 percent closer to pedestrians than combustion-engine vehicles before they make enough noise for their location to be detected.”
But so far, this hybrid creep seems to be an afterthought to the companies that make the cars. Two carmakers we spoke to said that it was never part of the discussion when developing their electric or hybrid vehicles. “It’s an easy fix,” one said.
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Tags: prius