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I would imagine the noise thrown off by tires (tire contact with road) is enough to still present problems for these neighborhoods.
I think the horses (hooves, rattling coaches with no rubber tires) may have made more noise than that.
To answer the supposition at the end of the article, they're already working on driverless racecars. http://selfracingcars.com/
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Unfortunately electric cars won't solve that problem. The graph on http://www.leiserstrassenverkehr.bayern.de/laerm/entstehung/ (a German government website) compares the engine noise ("Antriebsgeräusch") with the tire noise ("Rollgeräusch") for different speeds ("Gesamtgeräusch" means "total noise"). The yellow line is for trucks, the blue lines for cars. As you can see at a speed of 40 kph (25 mph) a car's tire noi…
Indeed. The engine noise is relevant for Formula 1, however, because high-performance race cars generally have much louder engines than commercial cars.
Even being televised, they've got to jack up the volume to try and make it seem more exciting.
When I went to my first F1 grand prix, I could hear the sound of the cars from the parking lot. As a huge fan, that gave me goosebumps and got me excited. The sound is a huge plus, and all fans I know love it. Yeah you need to plug your ears when you are in the stands, but I would take that over the sound of these electric cars.
I think they should focus on battery swapping as the way to deal with limited energy capacity. It makes for a nice spectacle watching pit crews do their thing. Swapping out an entire car and driver is just boring. Likewise the constraint to be able to swap the battery packs quickly will necessarily lead to the cars looking a bit different than F1. I think that also would be an improvement and help them differentiate as more than just "like F1 but more quiet and slow."
The ability to run events almost anywhere is a huge opportunity. It could make for some really compelling video footage in some awesome locations, if they can negotiate it.
Courses should focus on short sections and tight turns. Acceleration is where electric motors are most exciting, and keeping top speeds below the 200mph+ of F1 would let them run smaller events with less safety buffer space. Let people get up close and see the cars rocket out of each corner.
I went to the last season's final race in London. They are indeed significantly quieter than Formula 1 cars, but they're by no means silent. It's more of a not-uncomfortably-loud whining noise as the cars pass you. Formula E has been pretty exciting to me since I first heard about it 2 years ago. I wonder if it will really ever become a mainstream event though - as Formula 1 and similar gradually involve more EV elem…
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This is a common misconception about roadway noise pollution. Electric Vehicles will still generate a fair amount of road noise pollution. There will be important improvements for city quality of life, mostly in reductions in the sub 35kmh acceleration/deceleration moments. But for highway speeds the reductions will not be that big. Check this interesting wikipedia article for reference. Linking to the part that list…
I don't think it's entirely a misconception. Yes, some people mistakenly think that an all-EV world will be totally silent, and it won't, but the noise reduction is still huge. In most situations, the average is much less important than the maximum, so the fact that typical noise from modern cars is mostly tires and air is irrelevant. Trucks, motorcycles, and performance cars are what make up the bulk of the annoying…
To answer the supposition at the end of the article, they're already working on driverless racecars. http://selfracingcars.com/