Modern cars get a lot of moisture noise that it is increasingly difficult to hear emergency vehicles. Automakers have been developing technology to reduce road noise for decades and now car cabins are quieter than ever acura, for example, promotes the output of certain frequencies in the cabin to counteract others, such as freeway drone or road wind noise. And all that acoustic and wind tunnel testing has had unintended consequences with cars now so quiet, drivers struggle to hear ambulances and fire trucks.
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In other words, some Acura and Honda models have active noise cancellation to make the cabin a quiet or relaxing place. Not to mention the common use of many others, including BMW, to channel the noise intended to compensate for the loss of induction and exhaust notes. The point is, with today’s increasingly silent cabs and distractions, emergency responders have a harder time making themselves audible and visible to drivers, as NBC reports in this video:
This cocoon of modern cars, according to NBC, is a big problem. In an exchange between NBC Nightly News reporter and Colorado South Metro Fire Rescue Battalion Chief Mauricio Segura, we can hear the two say, respectively:
“That guy in front of you doesn’t move…”
“No. They can’t hear me.”
Emergency departments across the U.S. are trying to adapt to today’s quiet car cabins in a number of ways, including running two sirens simultaneously or using new “rumbler” sirens, which send vibrating pulses that add urgency to the wail of the siren But the damping and noise isolation of modern cars is getting better every year. This adds to the dangers emergency drivers and their passengers face.
Fire department and EMS response times average seven and eight minutes in American cities. And the difference between life and death can be 10 to 15 seconds in certain cases, according to NBC. Or, in the case of a heart attack victim, ten minutes is a deadly window of time. Similarly, fires can be out of control in just about 30 seconds.
This means drivers need to be alert and responsive so they can yield to emergency vehicles, but that’s hard to do when our new cars actively prevent loud noises from entering the cabin.
The Internet of Things may present a solution for emergency responders to alert drivers via infotainment displays. But until then, we’ll have to keep looking in the rear view and listening for emergency vehicles from inside our impossible-to-mute car cabins.
