This one is pretty cool and definitely surprised me.
> Motor Humming or Whirring when Navigating to a Supercharger
…
> In some circumstances (such as cold weather), it is normal for the motor(s) and components to make noise, such as humming or whirring as it generates heat to warm the Battery.
Super cool that the motors can be used for things other than moving the vehicle. It reminds me of how ESCs for RC vehicles use the motors to generate audible chirp tones to indicate status.
My understanding is that high-end residential heat pumps (e.g. Mitsubishi HyperHeat) will do this at lower temperatures as well. If the temp drops into the zone where the heat pump starts losing effectiveness (which on such systems is still pretty low, supposedly mine provides the full heat rating down to around 0F), they can run the blower motor in a less efficient regime to supplement the heat pump with a bit of resistance heating, without needing to fall back to a true "auxillary" heat source like heat strips or a furnace. That can extend the effective range down to a few degrees below zero (Fahrenheit).
Since I live in the southeast, that's more than good enough to skip installing any auxillary heat source in the first place.
This is an aside, but as a native of winter cold: shivering is an excellent strategy to avoid death, but it’s a terrible strategy for actually feeling warm. (Better is moving, relaxing, and massaging the ears/hands/feet to promote blood flow.)
Sort of makes sense to me. From what I understood from the wiki [1], you can compare the temperature regulation (very) roughly to a thermostat: There is a "target" temperature that the body "wants" to reach and a "current" temperature that the body senses it currently has.
If "current" is higher than "target", the body invokes several mechanisms to bring the temperature down, such as turning up sweat production and making you feel hot; if "current" is lower than "target", it does the same to raise the temperature e.g. by shivering and making you feel cold.
(Fever also works by changing the target temperature of that regulation system, which is why you feel cold at the beginning when the target was raised to the fever temperature and hot at the end when it was lowered back to the normal body temperature)
So it makes sense to me that shivering doesn't make you feel warm, because both, the feeling and the shivering are efforts by the body to raise the temperature.
I think there’s something else mentioned on that page that is a major contributor to feeling cold: redirecting blood flow away from the skin and in to the muscles (/organs)
It's not the same if you generate the heat outside and bring it inside, though. I don't know enough about where the fan is located to know if that's what you mean, but that would be different.
air/air heat pumps have a fan on both the inside and the outside. In modern designs, both those fans will be brushless DC, which enables deliberate heating through software.
Note however that both fans will typically be ~150 watts - which means that when heating they can't produce orders of magnitude more heat than that. So heat produced by the fan motor, even when run to generate as much heat as possible, probably won't be a very significant contributor to overall system heat output.
Maybe if you expect the heat pump to mainly move heat in, the heat generating parts should be on the inside, and reverse if you’re mainly moving heat out (A/C).
Don’t know if this is considered during installation?
The compressor is the only component that generates a substantial amount of heat. That's really it's purpose: trading a pressure increase in the refigerant for a rise in temp.
The compressor is usually in the outdoor unit, because of noise, size, and proximity to the controls. It also is the item that consumes most of the power, so for minisplits, the outdoor unit is the part wired for high currents. It usually is wrapped in a nice insulating blanket (for sound as well), and vapor injection techniques used in cold climate pumps means the heat wasted is minimal.
> It reminds me of how ESCs for RC vehicles use the motors to generate audible chirp tones to indicate status.
Super Mario Wonder from Nintendo recently uses the vibration motors in your controller to play sound effects in some places which I thought was an incredibly neat trick.
A gasoline based ICE is so incredibly inefficient it needs to shed heat or it would melt down. It makes more heat than that it makes motive power (the thing it is designed to do...). A 50 KW engine makes 200 KW(!!) of heat (at full throttle). Most of that heat energy exits the system through the exhaust gases but there is plenty that gets stuck in the body of the engine and you need to remove it from there somehow before it causes damage. That's where your cooling system comes in, a coolant (typically: water or glycol or a mixture) passes through its own channels in the engine around the thermally loaded parts such as the cylinder and head walls to remove the heat. This coolant is pumped around in the engine using the coolant pump to a radiator, usually located at the front of the car in the airstream to help reject the heat to the environment. The interior heater of a car basically just re-routes a bit of that heat in the cooling system into the cabin through a miniature radiator with a fan connected to it that doesn't vent into the environment but into the cabin.
So there is plenty of waste heat to go around. Some diesels got so efficient though that they needed an extra in-line heater to have enough heat for the cabin in specific operating domains (low power engine, low revs).
It is effectively co-generation: you get two different kinds of energy (motive and heat) and you use them for different purposes.
And that list is only getting longer, I think I'll pass it on to my kids.
Right now (and for the past couple of years) it has been mostly music but also still some more interesting tools to play with. Currently making a set of super realistic traffic lights for my youngest including pedestrian crossing and automatic cycle influencing (road coil pickup to detect car presence in front of the lights) for his model cars. Green wave, the works.
I've mostly stopped writing up the projects, but still have a bunch of posts pickled that I probably should finish. Most recent software bit: ear training module for pianojacq.com is work in progress (press low 'A' on an 88 key keyboard to enable the secret menu that will enable the ear trainer, it is not quite ready for mass consumption yet but it is getting there).
Even more off-topic, but something I’m struggling with personally: how do you find the time for projects, with kids in the picture? Me, I can just barely eke out a truncated workday, then it’s kids and housework until the kids go to sleep and maybe 1.5 hours of time until bed, which mostly I spend with my partner.
So I see people with diverse interests and kids and I just wonder: how!
Hm, that's a hard one. I try to involve my kids in them, this doesn't always work, but when it does it is fantastic.
I'm also an insomniac (it's 7:20 am here and I'm still awake...) so I have a ton of time when everybody is asleep (that's when I do most of my coding and reading), and when everybody is off to school I catch up on sleep. Not ideal but it mostly works. Another nice-to-have is that I can make ends meet with a relatively small fraction of the year spent on work (and that simply means I'm not reducing my savings, if I want to grow my savings I'd have to work more than that).
Yup, the trick with kids is simply staying up later. I usually do a couple 2 to 4am nights for freelance work, then do an early bed night, then repeat. Waking up at 7 to take the kids to school is a little rough, but a stop at the coffee shops always fixes that.
Oh cool, not to further derail this thread but the music direction is interesting. I've also just gotten (back) into music production using an MPC One+ and I used https://www.audiblegenius.com/ for music theory+ear training. A frequent theme I've noticed in Youtube tutorials is a ton of >35 software engineers mentioning they are getting into music and feeling the need to say how old they are, as I guess the meme is learning music is for naive 20yr olds.
For me it was COVID that drove me back to music, I had a ton of time on my hands and we'd just bought an old (and really crappy) piano so I decided to get more serious about it. Long way to go though before I'll be satisfied with it, and I doubt I ever will be. Not giving up, it is just too much fun.
So, you're officially an influencer now, I bought the course. Very high quality material, a ton of work must have gone into that. I hope to get my own stuff up to that level of polish, it certainly sets an example.
>Some diesels got so efficient though that they needed an extra in-line heater to have enough heat for the cabin in specific operating domains
I live on the top of a hill, so the first seven minutes or so of me driving anywhere is coasting at minimum engine power. Once air temp gets below 10C it's a long, slow painful wait for the vents to start blowing warm air. Especially unfortunate when you're waiting for the defroster to start doing something. I've considered installing a block heater, even though it wouldn't be needed to start the engine at all, just to warm the coolant up!
Such a slow warmup is probably also bad for your engine (the oil will be super hard to pump around so you'll have very little lubrication and very high oil pressure until it warms up a bit) so that block heater may well be useful in more ways than one.
You may want to look into oil that flows better at low temps in winter based on what temperature your engine eventually reaches when it is fully warmed up. There is a good chance that your engine will work better with different oils for winter and summer, also if you have an older car you may get some mileage out of blocking off a piece of the radiator.
It's supposed to run 5W-30 but for the cold months I do 5W-20. After watching the Project Farm metal on metal wear tests of 0W oils, and the fact I'm not running the engine at -20C, I'm not eager to go any lighter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtSwaF2evTU
Do 0w-30 not Xw-20. The number on the left is cold temperature performance, where cold temperature =not at operating temperature.
The number on the right is in the manual and you only change it when you go to the track.
Atm you're running a lighter oil than your car is designed to use and it's very likely to be a bad idea.
In the video you linked the only oils you can compare in the way he is comparing them are the 0w-20 and the 5w-20.
Later edit: I've watched that and since the tests the oils only at cold temperature it is entirely inconclusive wrt protection at operating temperature.
And cooking test is just dumb. Your oil rarely above operating spec. The only oil exposure to above spec temps is the oil in the top side while the engine is cooking after being stopped, and the oil in the burn chamber which burns and is then filtered out.
If you want to know how your oil is doing collect it after a service interval and send it to be tested.
The problem is that that cold oil is like sludge to pump around but your oil pump will try anyway. The result of that is insane oil pressure until the oil has warmed up enough to flow and that can cause all kinds of issue, from pump failure to cracks in lines. So it really isn't good but it will not show up in your oil analysis until something fails (and likely catastrophically) leaving your engine entirely without lubrication (you should get an immediate oil pressure alarm though when that happens, the sooner you can switch it off after that smaller the chance of damage).
On my car even with the 0W30 in it in winter the oil pressure starts almost at the top of the scale and as the oil warms up it drops, by the time it is warm enough at idle it sits at the lowest point on the scale + 1 unit. If I use the more sluggish summer oil for too long in winter I'll see it peg the needle on the oil pressure meter, and I have no idea how high it really is. So there is a substantial difference between the two, running temp is more or less the same when the engine is well and truly warmed up.
Definitely go for the 0W-30 if you're doing cold runs even if it isn't at -20C. I use it myself in the winter on an older engine for very similar reasons. That video is ... questionable ....
Maybe check if your EGR is operating properly? Also the resistance heater if equipped.
Most diesel cars equipped with EGR also detect its (frequent in older cars) failures, but I suppose it's possible to have a fault without it being detected.
EGR is responsible for recirculating exhaust gases back into the intake primarily to increase efficiency, but a nice side effect is that it heats up the engine a lot quicker.
Also, many diesel cars sold around here since 2000 or so are equipped with a resistance heater that kicks in when the engine is cold. Perhaps that's different in other markets.
> EGR is responsible for recirculating exhaust gases back into the intake primarily to increase efficiency, but a nice side effect is that it heats up the engine a lot quicker.
Efficiency does not need EGR. EGR only helps to keep NOX down when running efficiently. In some (many) vehicles EGR is disabled at cold temperatures.
Better than (or in addition to) a block heater is to have an AC cabin heater. Defa makes some really nice stuff, it's more or less "standard extra equipment" here in Scandinavia.
I'd like to add that ICEs need to run hot to minimize cylinder wall heat losses and allow more of the explosion to be converted into work instead of heat, although too hot and they break of course. Ideally the engine block would be at the same temperature as the combustion temperature, but we don't have the materials to achieve that yet.
> It makes more heat than that it makes motive power (the thing it is designed to do...).
Sure.. but try running that same engine when it gets too cold, which is why "block heaters" exist and get used in certain parts of the world. The operating temperature of the engine _is_ part of the design criteria.
Absolutely, but to get it there it has to work first or you'll have to pump in heat from some other source. Starting a large diesel in sub-zero temps can be quite challenging.
Unfortunately I have a vivid memory of the opposite: driving an extremely decrepit old car through the south in July, had to crank the heat to max to try to direct the heat away from the engine. No AC in the car, naturally.
I also have this memory. The A/C is a heat pump that just pulled heat to/from the radiator, which is used for both the engine and the A/C. So turning on the heat causes the thermostat to be tripped faster (or so I was told), moving heat away from the engine. You had to be moving for this to work well, especially if your thermostat was going bad.
I’m not sure what they mean about crypto miners or computers (mentioning cinebench), basically all the energy going in should be turned into heat so that should be near enough to 100% efficient. Where else would the energy be going? Sure, there will be a bit of RF power (Wi-Fi and some EMI) and depending on the device, a bit of light (LED indicators, monitor backlight) but that should be tiny compared to the energy that will end up as heat…
In terms of heating systems though, it’s normal for fuel based systems to be <100% because you need to vent exhaust, and a lot of your heat your fuel produced can be rejected away from where you want it with that. For example, older gas boilers might only be 80% efficient or so, and even the much more efficient condensing boilers are still only in the low 90s.
They mean a heat pump. You apply work to transfer heat, getting more inside than if you had just turned the energy into heat directly; the outside gets colder of course.
I think you lose some to RF, photons (with a monitor), sound waves, etc. Some of those losses can be reabsorbed and turned into heat, but some stray photons and radio waves will go out the window, never to return.
The majority does go to heat but you'll never hit the 100% threshold like other methods of heating can meet (or exceed)
Using a cryptominer or GP computer at full tilt for the purpose of making heat is less than 100% efficient, because some of the input power gets used on computing.
A pure resistive heater is also less than 100% efficient, but it's very very close.
So, I think I understand this view from the thermodynamics sense. First law and all.
But by this construction, are all systems which take energy as input (and do not convert it to another form for storage) de facto 100% efficient?
When we talk about a (very old) furnace being 75% efficient at turning the chemical energy of a fossil fuel into heat energy, is the 25% loss purely combustion byproducts with some inherent chemical energy plus some non-combusted fuel?
In this case for heating, efficiency is how much of the energy input gets converted into heat in the space you're heating.
So for a resistive electric heater, you're dissipating all of the energy as heat (minor quibbles about electromagnetic radiation or status LEDs aside). The same is true for your computer.
Burning hydrocarbons have two main sources of energy loss: incomplete combustion, and energy carried away by exhaust gases. Obviously furnace design influences both of these - the US federal minimum is 78%, but high-end furnaces with all the tricks can get over 90% per https://www.energy.gov/energysaver/furnaces-and-boilers
Heat pumps are the third major category, and they are more than 100% efficient because they are using their energy to steal a larger amount of thermal energy from the outdoors air and move it to inside your home (and much of the electric energy they consume is eventually discharged as heat inside your home as well).
Your computer is not doing work (in the thermodynamic sense) that gets stored anywhere in the computer, and it is not transmitting a significant amount of energy out the Ethernet port either. (It is moving some energy out the port, copper or fiber, but it’s likely receiving an almost equal amount back, and the power is question is negligible.)
Heat pumps can provide an “efficiency” of some 300-400%+. The “trick” is that they use electricity to move heat instead of creating heat, which is why heat pumps stop working well under a certain temperature.
They kinda work like a reverse refrigerator. A fridge takes heat out from the inside and moves it to the outside. A heat pump does the opposite.
> Actual heating systems can be better than 100% efficient, while crypto mining or cinebench or whatever is <100%.
The intricacies of why a crypto minor is less than 100% efficient when working as a heater are easily deduced, unless you’re precisely the sort of midwit that likes to leave replies such as the one you left.
I have a relatively analogue car (Subaru BRZ) and there are times when you shut it off on a warm day and then randomly about ten mins later a radiator fan kicks on. I guess it's to help cool down but I don't remember exactly what the manual says.
Basically it's cool how cars do things largely on their own sometimes to stay within certain parameters.
This is due to a phenomenon called heat soak which is where the engine temperature increases above normal for a time after it has been switched off due to the lack of coolant flow. The fan is coming on to aid cooling the engine/engine bay to reduce the effect of heat soak.
With carburettor fed engines it is sometimes advised by the manufacturer to allow the engine to idle for some time after running it at high RPM. This is because the effect of heat soak can be significant enough to boil all the fuel off in the carb, making the engine hard to restart when hot.
In my experience it was more than 20 years ago that this happened. It was when most cars switched to fuel injection. Late 80s, early 90s. Treating a car as an appliance and having it 'just work' became so much easier when fuel injection was invented.
20 years ago was 2003, which is practically yesterday [in my mind...].
To my knowledge it is because the the oil and water needs the motor on to move through the engine and cool certain parts . If the motor is shout down to early and those can’t circulate anymore following could happen
-turbocharger overheats
-oil overheats
And the things you stated and much more …
Better to let the motor run while standing is to run it the last kilometers in low rpm
There have existed "turbo timers" that keep the engine running for a short time after the key is off to help avoid this. Not sure if that works with modern cars as easily.
Modern turbo designs (most anything in the last 25 years, at least) use water cooled turbos and convection keeps the water flowing after the engine is turned off. This is why we don't use turbo timers any more.
And also even back then it affected almost no one, there were loads of tests done on this by automotive magazines of the era and found out that usually the last 1-2 minutes of gentle driving to your driveway/garage is more than enough to cool down the turbo properly, the only people affected were those who due to either aggressive driving or circumstances of their location would drive at high rpm, stop, then immediately shut down their engines.
The fan is triggered by a relay, triggered by the ECU, which uses coolant sensors (the thermostat sensor that is iirc not always the mechanical thermostat) to adjust when to cool the radiator. That temp is much higher than the ambient air will ever get, so if the fan comes on after the car is turned off then either it was just about at the temp that would have turned on the fan, or something could be slowly going wrong with the car to trigger the fan unnecessarily. A car is a system of systems so many different things can cause it.
If it happens a lot (when turned off) I'd think about having an inspection done. Worst case scenario, engine ends up overheating, warps or explodes, and you need a new one. Coolant system is one of those "oh shit" systems that you need to pay close attention to.
Car engines heat up when you park, because the air cooling and circulation of the coolant keeps it cooler while driving. It seems completely within the common laws of physics that when you are at not so uncommon temperatures, the coolant closer to the engine heats up well above standard operating temperatures once the car is off, and then convection currents bring enough of this overheated coolant to the sensor to trigger the fan. I have seen this behavior on many cars over the years, without any underlying concern in any of them. If it is not running hot while driving, I personally would not worry about it.
For those curious, the coolant around the engine block can boil and flow upwards after the engine is off, and the coolant circulation system is designed to handle this pattern. You can observe this yourself if you overfill your coolant and take it out on a hot day, the excess hot coolant will bubble up and run out for a good while after the engine is off.
I second the advice that if the engine isn’t overheating while running, everything is likely working as intended.
It's also a common cause of breakdowns... The fan normally cools the radiator, but the temperature sensor is on a coolant hose. Since the engine is stopped coolant isn't flowing so the fan isn't cooling the same thing the sensor is sensing, which means it can end up running for 30 mins or more. Since the fan can be 20 amps or so, you can easily kill old car batteries due to this effect. User comes back after an hour shopping to find their car battery is dead.
If I was a car manufacturer, I would wire the fan into the ignition circuit so it can never run with the ignition off - it's fairly useless to have a fan blowing on a radiator when the coolant isn't flowing anyway.
Yes, but other posters are mistaken that it is a 'clever' feature to prevent overheat during heat soak. It is instead more an accidental byproduct of the fact it is wired direct to the battery and not to the ignition circuit. Thats done to save a couple of cents on the ignition switch (no need for a large high current fan to be powered through it).
> Thats done to save a couple of cents on the ignition switch (no need for a large high current fan to be powered through it).
The fan must be powered by a relay in most cases so this is utter bullshit.
In most any modern car the fan is controlled by the ECM (a computer).
Furthermore this fan relay will come on in anticipation of high heat load such as when the AC is turned on as well in cars without dual fans.
There is so much more complexity here than just wiring through the ignition circuit (which wouldn’t cost any more anyway as noted) that thinking this is a cost saving issue is utterly clueless.
And the temperature sensor that controls it is invariably located in the engine block, not the radiator hose. Modern cars may have multiple sensors but they need one in the block.
Cooling fans in most cars don’t draw 20 amps while running normally (they should be closer to 10), and while anything can fail the cooling fan in these setups should only run for a few minutes. Draining the battery like you claim is not a “common” cause of breakdowns.
You clearly don’t know much about modern (last >30 years) cars to be commenting on them so authoritatively, tone down your arrogance.
This is a typical setup (and it’s 20 years ago). Debunking two of your claims. First note that the condenser fan is wired through the ignition, debunking the notion that it would be costly to do so and that running the main fan bypassed isn’t intentional. Also note that the actual fan control is the lower right black box PCM/ECM (engine computer)
Cars are like people. Sometimes a quirk is normal, and sometimes it means your bottom end is gonna fall out. Gotta get regular checkups and hope you catch it in time.
> Car engines heat up when you park, because the air cooling and circulation of the coolant
A further reason is no movement = no wind speed. I used to have an old Pontiac grand am with the ram air. I had overheating issues sometimes that were literally solved by going faster.
I don’t think this is true - this is completely normal behaviour. The cooling fan is coming on due to a phenomenon called heat soak which is where the engine temperature increases above normal for a time after it has been switched off due to the lack of coolant flow. The fan is coming on to aid cooling the engine/engine bay to reduce the effect of heat soak.
With carburettor fed engines it is sometimes advised by the manufacturer to allow the engine to idle for some time after running it at high RPM. This is because the effect of heat soak can be significant enough to boil all the fuel off in the carb, making the engine hard to restart when hot.
I have the same car, it does this too. As have most if not all of my other cars I've owned. I've always put it down to the fact there is no cooling from the forward motion of the car passing air towards the radiators so the engine slowly heats from the already generated heat from driving. The temperature hits the limit the sensor has set and the fan turns on until it's below that set temperature.
Because it was designed with Toyota I don't know if the BRZ does it, but a number of other Subarus will kick on an recovery pump ~6 hours after ignition. It sounds sort of like a small/quiet compressor.
Before I looked up what it was, I kept hearing a gentle noise coming from the garage in the late evening. Figured it was noise from outside... Then one day I was out there and heard it start, realized it was the car, and looked it up.
This confused the hell out of me the first time I heard it. Taking the garbage out in the middle of the night and hear whirring coming from under a vehicle that hasn't moved in hours.
Supposedly one of the arguments for lane splitting in California was the propensity for bikes to overheat out here when stopped in traffic. My 650 did not have a fan but it did a good enough job heating up my crotch to a nearly unbearable degree on a hot day without it.
I have certainly experienced overheating due to traffic on my air cooled bike. Now I am thinking about adding a fan to my oil cooler that would either be on a switch or even on a proper thermostat.
Back when I watched more F1 racing they had a musical performance where they used the telematic systems of some cars, with their high revving motors, to play notes ie the telematics selectively. I couldn't readily find a reference but remember the event.
> Super cool that the motors can be used for things other than moving the vehicle. It reminds me of how ESCs for RC vehicles use the motors to generate audible chirp tones to indicate status.
> Motors are multi-purpose devices!
In WALL-E, one of the robots following the title character, lacking any audio output, spins its motors at different rates to play the tune from Hello, Dolly! that it had learned from WALL-E.
This reminded me of the SmartKnob View I saw on YT a while back, it's a knob built on a burshless motor that's controlled to provide the user with software defined feedback like tactile clicks and end stops
So the sound of the impact is how you distinguish the sound of an old corvette with an automatic transmission and the sound of a GM powered boat as both their engines are from the same family?
This is the kinda good natured fun that I really liked Tesla for before they announced an armored vehicle that's designed in a way to increase the likelihood of accidentally running over your kids playing in the driveway.
Alternately, it’s designed in a way that almost all trucks and SUVs in the US are designed, in a way that is generally expected/preferred by customers who buy those vehicles.
I also don’t like it, but it’s not Tesla’s fault that that’s where the market is. I’ve heard from so many foolish people who don’t understand physics that they feel safer driving a big heavy vehicle and being up high.
The armor has nothing to do with the height and sight lines; it’s also not anything specific to the Cybertruck. Even midsize SUVs now are so high up and boxy that you can’t see in front of the front bumper. I was in an Escalade or Expedition or Tahoe or something the other day on the way to JFK and noticed that the center console screen has an option to view a front-bumper-cam. It’s nuts.
If this is truly a problem that needs affirmative fixing, it seems that auto industry regulation (which is already mandating cellular transceivers in vehicles, so it is definitely in scope) would be the place to address this. Expecting market participants to kneecap themselves in the face of clear market demand (especially whilst already fighting the risky and uphill battle that is EV adoption) is not fair or realistic.
IMO it could be covered in giant sharp stainless steel hedgehog spikes and be nicknamed the Childslayer and it’s probably still less dangerous to our society than something that burns petrochemicals. If you want to regulate something for safety, ban the sale of gasoline/diesel and the use of internal combustion engines.
There's an interesting bit in car guys vs bean counters where the author recalls the new regulations mandating a smaller average size car. US manufacturers had to make much smaller cars to lower their average. But US customers just weren't interested. They wanted big cars, not just new cars. Japanese manufacturers (who were already lower then the regulated average) stepped in and built new big cars.
Not totally similar to your point as safety regs would be more equal, but it was an interesting revelation to me (especially as here in the EU small cars are much more desirable) that really market demands are as much of a driver of these things as manufacturer production.
Regulation has to be in the right place too, ideally giving the real trade off to the consumer. (the book suggests that if America taxed fuel more like the rest of the world so you didn't have such cheap gas, car efficiency would become a much bigger selling point, leading to more demand for smaller less ridiculous cars). But I suspect that would change less the demand for low gas cars, and more the demand for low gas tax politicians.
It's an arms race though, most people prefer bigger cars because it makes them feel safer from all of the other big cars on the road.
Also it was actually the gas efficiency regulation that started the arms race, because big trucks were exempt from the regulations so car manufacturers started pushing more people towards buying trucks instead of sedans.
> I’ve heard from so many foolish people who don’t understand physics that they feel safer driving a big heavy vehicle and being up high
Can you elaborate on this a little? I only took Physics up to University level so maybe I'm missing something, but - why _wouldn't_ that make you safer in the case of a collision? My naïve assumption is that it would:
a) decrease effective force on the passengers (greater mass of car => less acceleration from a given collision force => less force transferred to passenger)
b) make the car less likely to flip (assuming that the increased mass offsets the extra instability from the height of the vehicle - which, since the chassis is likely heavier on the bottom than the large hollow areas at the top, I think is likely)
c) move the passengers (slightly, but non-negligibly) out of the direct line of impact
"Driving a big heavy vehicle and being up high" might well make you _more likely_ to have a collision, meaning that you total aggregate chance of injury goes up even as "chance of injury, given a collision" goes down - but that's more about misunderstanding statistics than physics, as well as selfishly prioritizing personal safety over societal safety.
It doesn’t make the car less likely to flip except when the mass is extremely concentrated at the bottom (such as in a Tesla where there is a huge dense battery pack in the bottom). The COG is much higher on SUVs and trucks than it is on passenger cars. It has improved, but it is still bad.
Being out of the “line of impact” is mostly irrelevant when you are going 80mph and the vehicle hits something. That kinetic energy is going somewhere.
Large/heavy vehicles are less maneuverable and take longer to stop because of their increased kinetic energy at cruise. In collisions the massive added weight means they have much more energy that needs to go somewhere at time of impact.
The passenger safety of a car in a collision is not determined by which vehicle is still more car-shaped after the wreck, otherwise the bigger and heavier your vehicle, the better off you’d be.
Additionally, pushing around the big and heavy chassis uses way more energy unnecessarily, which is not crash safety related, but is still very unsafe due to the fact that burning petrochemicals is currently in the process of literally destroying our civilization. You might not crash, but you will burn.
Tesla cars, including the Cybertruck, are much less likely to run over things, including kids, than most every other vehicle. There are distance sensors around the entire perimeter of the car that give you a visual and audio queue for when you're close to stuff, and there's cameras that also cover 360 degrees that show pedestrians and other obstacles on the navigation screen.
The people at Tesla have a lot of fun even with the Cybertruck: why aren't the windows also bullet proof to small arms? Well, because it'd have to be really thick, and we recommend instead that you simply duck when shot at.
> "Tesla cars, including the Cybertruck, are much less likely to run over things, including kids, than most every other vehicle"
Citation/data needed. For a vehicle that does not have millions of miles in test or production usage, with all respect, this is a marketing statement. (Millions of miles is even low, a few hundred or thousand vehicles hit those numbers in no time)
One could say the truck is designed in that way.. but again, citation needed.
> There are distance sensors around the entire perimeter of the car that give you a visual and audio queue for when you're close to stuff, and there's cameras that also cover 360 degrees that show pedestrians and other obstacles on the navigation screen.
Are the majority of pedestrian collisions while backing up at low speed? Does this capability have anything to do with pedestrian safety vs not backing up into a mailbox? Will these cameras move the needle in any way for pedestrian fatalities after being struck by a vehicle?
> There are distance sensors around the entire perimeter of the car
Those have been gone a while. Just cameras now, and a lot of the functionality we had on earlier Teslas still lags behind on the newer camera-only cars.
If you want ultrasonic sensors and full 360 degree camera, you have to get something more advanced, like a Nissan Rogue. No joke ;-). Tesla does not offer this ability.
I don't get it. OK there are sounds to let you know the car is falling apart constantly, but this one is ambient sound of people encouraging you to accelerate??
I still don't understand. Is that a feature of the vehicle or not? Is this an April Fool's joke or is there a setting that cheers on the driver while accelerating? I see some individuals took insult to my question. Some of the sounds are pings and pops and knocks to mimic a combustable engine. What is this sound for?
The loud "pops" at superchargers and when driving after supercharging surprised me for a while. I would stop to look under the car if I had hit something. The pops while charging are sort of self-explanatory, but those while driving took me a while to associate back to the prior supercharging.
Basically, changes in temperatures are causing the pops. It's kind of weird and slightly annoying. Sometimes it happens for quite a bit after charging, particularly when driving through changing climate (i.e. climbing mountains). Having done Reno/SF round trips a good few times now, I've gotten used to it.
I appreciate those pops and bangs, as a reminder of what it means to pump 250kW into a battery I'm sitting on top of. Especially in comparison to the 48kW that supplies my entire house.
I have a room in my attic that can make really loud bangs on hot summer nights (enough to scare the crap out of me when I am concentrating on something and do not expect them) when it contracts again after a day in the heat. The root cause there is stick slip: the thing doesn't move for a long time due to its weight so tension builds up and then suddenly it will shift a little and the whole structure amplifies the sound from the shockwave passing through it.
Your 'pops' remind me of that (and supercharging must have some thermal effects).
Similar mechanism as your attic noises. There's a giant metal plate on the bottom of the thing, so all the heat generated while it's supercharging (in a very cold environment) causes that 'snap' which makes a loud noise. Same thing happens if you've ever heated up a thin metal baking sheet. It'll 'snap' from one position to another and make a horrible racket.
Same thing apparently happens if you are heavy on regenerative braking when descending a mountain pass. Cold air, plus 50kW+ of regen braking is similar to just supercharging the car.
Never experienced the steam myself, although I can't say I've ever tried supercharging the car at 5F. Coldest I've ever done it was probably in the 40s, which is plenty cold enough to cause that popping sound when it's pulling 250kW.
Thinking back to it, the battery must have been extremely warm at the time too, since that 5F was after two hours through a 2 lane mountain road (crossing the range).
thanks! I've heard the pops during my winter trips but never associated with thermal expansion! Always thought I'd hit some animals or debris on the road.
They also had a recall on the pressure release valves. The car was allowing the pressure to get too high inside thr battery and would make a pop on release.
If I was the engineering team, I would be trying to eliminate all these noises.
Every single one of these could be engineered away. For example the pops and bangs at a supercharger is the metal shield deforming when heated. Instead, it should have circular ridges stamped into it around the fixing points to let it expand against the springiness of the steel.
The clunk noise from brakes could be engineered away by using stainless steel spring clips to prevent the pads being able to wiggle around in the calipers (used by many manufacturers already).
The clunk from the contactors opening/closing could be engineered away by having the contactors open/close far slower - with a proper precharge, no current is flowing, so there is no longevity benefit of fast close/open. Or... decide not to have contactors at all - I don't really see any reason they're needed, just keep the high voltage system always energized and design all the other components to have a suitably low leakage current. For maintenance and emergency de-energization, have a manual lever or a pyro-fuse.
It is a matter of priorities. If that was a high priced Bentley where the customer doesn't expect anything but the best for their money, sure, go ahead.
But for a Model 3 where you need to carefully manage costs or you will either price yourself out of the market (and Tesla is already at the high end of it!) or go bankrupt I think you will have much bigger fish to fry than dealing with such noises.
You also obviously don't understand the engineering decisions - e.g. having the high voltage always on is not possible/allowed. It is a legal requirement because it must be possible to disable the high voltage circuit when doing maintenance on the car - or in the case of an accident. And it needs to switch off the moment the airbags activate, it is not only there for the firemen to turn off.
Also having the high voltage circuit off when the car is parked reduces the risks of fire should anything happen (malfunction, another vehicle crashes into a parked Tesla, etc.)
Manual lever is of no use in such situations. Pyrofuses Tesla already has.
> having the high voltage always on is not possible/allowed.
I am aware of no law requiring that...
Plenty of other high voltage things are always on - for example the outlets in your living room are always live even if you aren't using the room.
The electrical danger of your house would be reduced by turning them off when you weren't in the room, but we decided it wasn't worth the complexity/cost to do so for the tiny benefit.
Electrical contractors in cars are in the same position IMO. It should be energised once in the factory, and then remain energised for the life of the car. Car service garages can have tools to de-energise and re-energise the HV system if necessary - rather like such tools exist to gas and degas aircon systems.
Newer cars don't make as much noise. My 2019 Model 3 was a popping banging noisemaker at the supercharger. My 2023 Model 3 barely makes any sounds at all. So they've clearly done some work to lower the sounds.
> The clunk noise from brakes could be engineered away by using stainless steel spring clips to prevent the pads being able to wiggle around in the calipers (used by many manufacturers already).
I've owned a lot of performance cars, and I don't know of any that didn't make noise. You're thinking of floating calipers, which are quieter and what most appliance cars use. Tesla is using fixed calipers, which most manufacturers only put on their performance trims. Making a bit of noise is just the nature of that design.
And the brakes aren't Tesla designs anyway, they're Brembo just like almost every other OE fixed caliper setup. I think Brembo knows how to make brakes.
Sound design is an important part for many other manufacturers. There are literally people who's job it is to make sure that things like the "thump" of a closing door sounds good and on-brand. Though to be fair it's kind of an outgrowth of legacy car manufacturers who need to sell tiny bits of progress to stay relevant.
You mean when you physically close a car door they might shape the internal sound dynamics in either the frame or inside the door or adding some surface layer to the door itself?
> Every single one of these could be engineered away.
You clearly didn't read half of the article. 50% of these are purposeful chimes.
Also, why? What is the value of making a compressor or fan more quiet on the 3? It would be much better to lower the cost. Worry about the sound on the higher end vehicles but let the 3 be low cost.
Especially considering the alternative people are coming from is a loud very noisy machine with lots of moving parts, the fact it makes any sounds is probably not a big deal in the sum of things. Maybe eventually as everyone is in EVs this will be something people notice/care about in a competitive product way and you could or try to eliminate or shape the sounds to be more pleasing beyond. It’d probably make iteration more expensive if it became a requirement.
Most of the time they operate with lots of ambient noise of the tires on the road and outside the car which probably makes a lot of these barely audible or noticeable.
The sounds are not that intrusive...While others have pointed out the costs involved in solving them, the real question is "will muting each and every sound sell more cars?". Of course from an engineering point of view the other question is "are these sounds indicative of something that will fail prematurely?". The complexity of adding some sort of muting may introduce other modes of failure. Sometimes the best solution is the simple solution.
At this point in the EV marketplace the I would say the answer is no to both questions. Tesla is far better concentrating their engineering teams on new products that can continue their growth.
Now if some competitor comes up with a perfectly quiet car and that becomes a selling point, then it is time to revisit the engineering.
"will muting each and every sound sell more cars?".
Maybe muting sounds won't. But a general focus on quality will. There's a good amount of potential customers who consider Tesla low quality. There's a good amount of EV competitors who deliver better quality, these days.
And, more importantly, it might not sell more cars next quarter. But not doing that will lead to a continued decline in perception, and that is a price that's only paid a few years later.
Growth mattered above all when Tesla was creating the market. That is shifting right now, and a "new products! growth!" approach won't be the winning strategy for much longer. And, most importantly, cars are not software. You can't fix reputational issues with a patch.
If Tesla waits until the competitors are quiet, it's too late. "We're almost as good as our competitor" is not a helpful selling strategy for cars. For most consumers, a car is a long-term (4-8 years) commitment, bought on a very reputational basis.
Adding to peer comments, being perceived as a low or high quality brand does have a strong material impact to a business. It's the difference between, "Oh, you have a Tesla!" to, "Oh. You have a Tesla.."
Tesla struggles with poor build quality and a lot of owners don't expect that, especially if they only listen to Elon Musk. Fixing the sounds won't sell more Teslas but a higher quality car would have already addressed them.
The government-mandated “safety” tone that EV’s play at low speed was invented by a marketing department. They wanted to be able to force everyone to play their audio logos.
Fast-forward a decade, and the bought-off regulators left for industry. The remaining transportation safety people in the US realized the tones are useless, since the sounds are not standardized and are therefore ambiguous and ignorable.
So, moving forward, they’ll standardize the noise, defeating its only practical purpose (branding). Sadly, they didn’t revisit whether it was actually necessary or helpful in the first place.
Our pre-tone EV makes plenty of noise at low speed due to various servos, capacitor whine, drivetrain gears/friction, and so on.
Yes? Tesla historically cuts costs as much as possible, putting all the focus on an excellent electric engine and batteries. Everything else takes a second seat.
For example they removed the ultrasonic parking sensors. They removed the radar. In the next revision, they removed the stalks in favor of buttons on the steering wheel to control the blinkers.
The car is still expensive, but that’s down to in part batteries and the tech still being somewhat pricey, and in part just profit (contrast to e.g. Ford selling their cars at a loss).
I suppose it depends on whether their more important goal is to provide the best possible service to their customers, or to make the most possible profit.
I guess the question would be, if indeed these suggestions would solve those problems, how much does this cost (I genuinely have no idea!) and how much do I want to spend on this versus putting up a webpage to direct people too.
I want to shave off every last ms of latency in the services I own but at the end of the day at some point it’s good enough (and best for the business) just to manage expectations.
The brake pedal does not have to make noise for me to know the brakes are working. The pads do not have to clunk. There does not need to be a thunk to the contacts opening on the battery when I park for me to know the car is parked. There is a difference between convenience acknowledgements and mechanical parts being clunky, they are all put together here.
Kind of shows where Tesla put its focus, and that there is work to do on future models. People used to higher end cars tend to notice and maybe not like the extra clunky bits, everything should just work smoothly and quietly.
> People used to higher end cars tend to notice and maybe not like the extra clunky bits, everything should just work smoothly and quietly
That's kind of funny. Higher end cars are where you most commonly find fixed caliper brakes, and we are 100% used to the little noises they make. What's unusual here is Tesla choosing fixed calipers for an appliance car. So now we have people used to driving Priuses being exposed to mechanical sounds they're not familiar with.
That and electric cars are so quiet that you're going to hear things that are drowned out by an engine on other cars.
I think I would happily pay money for an archive of high-quality recordings of what various problems sound like, in a variety of cars.
It would really be nice not to have to go in and try to imitate the sound to my mechanic, and it would help give me an idea what the repair ought to cost.
I've spent thousands of dollars on misdiagnosed (or misrepresented) "repairs," and it would be great to get a diagnosis from the mechanic, look it up, and say, "No, it doesn't sound a thing like that."
That would be a great help!...whenever it's an engine issue. Or when it's a failure of one of the parts of the engine.
Recent sounds I've tried to imitate have included "I got a bad tank of gas that was 20% water, and it's January in New England, and ice is pinging around," "I think my muffler has a leak," and "Maybe one of my wheel bearings is going bad?"
I drive a 17-year-old car with 225k miles on it because I don't want to drive anything made after the advent of smartphones, so I get to make lots of funny noises. The muffler one and the wheel bearing seem like they should have been findable!
My previous car, a 2014 Model S, had my favorite acceleration sound of any car: a guttural whine in a perfect third, ascending as speed increased, and louder as load increased. It's the only thing I miss after upgrading to a Model 3. Well, that and the ability to do burnouts. Confused quite a few people doing that.
Reminds me of my old civic, pre-cvt, once you get to about 70kph, it would shift into a high gear and then engine noise would become a satisfyingly low hum. My current car with CVT hasn't got an operating regime I enjoy like that.
I don't have a Tesla, but I hear this sound in my own car, especially now that it's winter. I began hearing this after my recent car service that involved a ~real~ rear brakes replacement. When I took my car to the service guy, it was afternoon and I was no longer able to reproduce the noise.
This was driving me crazy until now! I now know it's nothing to worry about.
I’m not sure I agree with Tesla on this diagnosis. To me that sound is metal rubbing against metal with friction.
Before I investigated pads and discs, my first port of call would have been any ball joints. I don’t know the typical Tesla suspension make up but if there’s any bottom ball joint at the control arm / wheel carrier interface or tie-rod end, then that would be first.
Either way, definitely sounded like a failing ball joint to me. I’d want to visually inspect the dust boots for cracks, use a pick to check it’s still fully packed with healthy grease, then with wheels in the air, manipulate the wheel - hands at 12 o clock and 6 o clock, rock back and forth (testing bottom ball joint). Hands at 3 and 9 o clock (testing tie rod end).
Of course brake pads on discs can also fit the profile of “metal rubbing against metal with friction” but in that particular recording… unless the audio has been messed with (which from listening to some other clips I think they have applied some hi and lo cut with roll off in post)
This one is normal (every tesla I know of does this, ymmv of course). However their older model 3 and y were equipped with some very shoddy engineered suspension arms which, over time, started to creak because water can enter them. Also all the water from the front window was/is distributed more or less directly over the suspension arms. Newer models have somewhat better suspension arms equipped.
On my very first onramp I nearly totaled it under the back of a heavy, slow truck. I was so used to flooring the pedal to get up to highway speed and totally unprepared for that instantaneous acceleration.
I've driven the Ioniq 5 and I can easily hear a high pitched motor whine at speeds between 45 and 60 mph. I cannot hear any noise below 45 or above 60, other than the intentional pedestrian warning sound.
I suspect as I age my ability to hear such high pitched whine will be gone.
Tesla is new and mostly for tech-oriented people, the expectations are new and more techy things are ok. Legacy brands have expectations set in peoples' minds, so they have to keep up with their history.
It's more a tech-guy thing than EVs: I'm very aware and listening to sounds made by ICE cars or motorbikes, and I'm not a mechanic, just a little bit techy. The sounds are different on EVs because some are new to us: those related to charging, the battery, the motors, ... we don't expect them yet. That doc is really good for this, but only for us technies. Most people won't care until something is not functioning though.
The mandatory noise maker is an important pedestrian safety feature. It helps you avoid getting hit by cars. It's also only required at low speeds (and at higher speeds it wouldn't matter anyways due to tire noise dominating).
This isn't a problem in my neighborhood, the opposite has now happened. I can hear my neighbors more than a block away. And it's actually not the EVs that are the worst offenders -- it's Toyota hybrids. They -howl- and are much louder than the non-hybrid equivalent. My Model 3 just makes white noise. Same volume as any other unmodified car at low speeds. Tire noise quickly dominates in either case, of course, above 10-15 mph or so.
I'd love to see the same collection of sounds and authoritative explanations for the Prius. I own a Gen II, and it makes a lot of interesting noises. After 15+ years I've learned what sounds are normal, but I still don't know what most of them are.
there are many "similar" chime noises for entirely different warnings on this page (no seatbelts; proximity alarms, ...). I'm not sure what is a good UI here, but I feel that this ain't it.
Feels like a good opportunity to in addition to having the normal system diagnosis, have a process that listens to the sound the car makes and recommend bringing it into the shop if the sound sounds weird or off.
Same here. I've had other weird interactions with Dark Reader before - one was where minecraft.net refused to let me log in until I turned off Dark Reader.
I own Model Y and "High-Pitched Whining Noise while Accelerating" is my favorite sound. I hear it pretty much every day and it never gets old. I wonder if other EVs make that sound, but it's just incredible.
We used to have a Bolt, and it had some whine. My '19 P3D had a lot of whine at full tilt, and my '23 3LR has a good bit as well. My guess is all EVs have it to some extent.
I kinda want the ability to have that piped into the car. Make it sound like an R/C car.
After listening to a few dozen chimes and confusing some of them I can't help but wonder why we accept technology to communicate to us in this crude way. Why not make it talk to us, "too fast", "too close", "hand brake active", etc.?
Might want to keep chimes for emergency warnings where speech would be too slow, although there's an argument to be made that speech would still be better, since jarring chimes might scare you so much that you take just as much if not more time until you've identified the emergency.
background: I had a model 3 for a couple of years and now have a Y ( no longer have the 3). The 3s are insanely quiet. The Y is ok but has a whistle at certain cruising speeds (90-100km/h).
But when they are supercharging they are both ridiculously loud. Like having AC on full bore. Also starting a charge makes the most bangs and pops, regardless of the charger type.
I just finished a 2000km drive and slept in the back on a sleeping mat. Sometimes I parked right next to the highway where trucks were flying past. It was almost silent inside, they really are well insulated from external noise.
I think maybe you just got lucky. My first Model 3 was sort of quiet (just wind noise, Model 3s and Ys are quite loud compared to other similar cars). My current model 3 (a 2023 model) has a whistle at highway speeds that I haven't been able to isolate. Along with a fluttering sound, which may be related, and sounds like it's coming from the passenger side mirror area.
The next Model 3 ("Highland") uses laminated glass in the rear windows, whereas the current one just uses it for the front. Should be the quietest yet.
I've seen a Model 3 with very similar sounds coming from the passenger side mirror. There was a loose piece sticking out of the bottom, pushing it back in fixed it.
Safari is AFAICT the strictest browser in terms of ensuring no audio plays on a page until a user interaction triggers, and yet _all_ the sounds on this page played when I opened it. Confusing, to say the least!
"TERRAIN, TERRAIN! whoop whoop PULL UP!" -- the makers of the Terrain Avoidance and Warning System (TAWS) thought that this extra information was useful. Maybe the timing is different or maybe it's just cultural.
Yeah, it's both an earlier development, and it also doesn't really apply fully. In almost all modern aircraft, aural alerts are only used for very dangerous situations that require immediate pilot action. However, there are still a lot of "abstract" sounds used, either where it occurs often (like autopilot disconnect) or where spelling it out isn't needed (like a generic warning or caution tone to bring attention to the display that describes the error)
Confirmation tones are used to convey that the car registered a deliberate user action (e.g. a button press). For example whenever you press the unlock button on your key fob, it would quickly become annoying if the car announced "The car is now locked". In the case of confirmation, you know what the tone is signaling, because you just performed the action to create the tone (and don't need a lecture about it).
Mildly abrasive 'alert' tones are preferred for warnings over announcements because alerts typically require immediate action. You could follow the alert tone by an announcement but this is typically unnecessary because the the first time you hear it, the tone will be seared into your memory (e.g. you are messing with the radio and suddenly hear the lane departure warning or forward collision warning). And you really don't need to distinguish between them - they all basically mean "immediately allocate all cognitive resources towards driving this death machine safely".
> it would quickly become annoying if the car announced "The car is now locked"
Ha, I'm having flashbacks to my neighbor's old Chrysler New Yorker (from the K car era). "The door is ajar, the door is ajar." And couldn't just say it was open, that doesn't sound fancy enough.
> the first time you hear it, the tone will be seared into your memory
Indeed, the joke is that the Tesla alert tone causes PTSD after you hear it the first time.
This does not account for inattentional deafness, which is why there ought to be sense-redundant alerts, at least for alerts requiring immediate action.
What would be the point? The car has a huge number of more accurate sensors for nearly every thing you can think of. If you're bored go look at some of the errors people have posted. It measures a huge number of variables directly that will indicate an issue well before ambient noise will.
Today I learned. The Tesla owner's manual has alt descriptions for its images. They're not good alt descriptions, but they are there.
In fact, it is one of the most screen reader accessible manuals for any device I've ever seen, most are some weird PDF abominations where all the button names are replaced by their unlabeled icons. Even devices made specifically for the blind have these issues sometimes. This? This is just perfectly readable HTML.
It's especially ironic considering that Teslas (as far as I know) aren't accessible in any way. Even the infotainment system, which a blind person might want to use, for example when waiting for a sighted acquaintance in the car, does not have a screen reader and is not in any way usable.
> Even the infotainment system, which a blind person might want to use, for example when waiting for a sighted acquaintance in the car, does not have a screen reader and is not in any way usable.
It has really excellent voice commands for pretty much any function though. Sadly it can only be triggered by pressing the right scroll wheel on the wheel. While possible to just reach over, it's probably not optimal for your suggested use case.
I don't think that there are any cars that are accessible in the way you've mentioned. It seems like too niche of a use case in exchange for more complexity and time to develop. These systems are usually built for drivers first and foremost, so them being able to see is an assumption that most can make.
> Motor Humming or Whirring when Navigating to a Supercharger
…
> In some circumstances (such as cold weather), it is normal for the motor(s) and components to make noise, such as humming or whirring as it generates heat to warm the Battery.
Super cool that the motors can be used for things other than moving the vehicle. It reminds me of how ESCs for RC vehicles use the motors to generate audible chirp tones to indicate status.
Motors are multi-purpose devices!