The artificial sounds placed in electric cars to alert the pawns of their approach may have the opposite effect, confused even more and increasing the risk of accidents.
A new one from the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, revealed a worrying failure in sound alerting systems created to increase the safety of electric cars.
According to investigators, the artificial sounds issued by these vehicles – especially when there are several gifts at the same time – can actually hinder the perception of its locationincreasing the risk of accidents for pedestrians.
Unlike combustion engines, the Electric cars are almost quiet Low speeds, which represents a danger to pawns, cyclists and visually impaired people, who depend on the sound to detect the approach of vehicles. To combat this problem, AVAS (Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems) ( issue warning sounds when they circulate slowly or in-moving.
However, the new study, published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, shows that not all avas sounds are effective. Researchers have tested four different types of sounds: traditional combustion engine noise, a filtered sound, a two-tone sound signal (similar to beep of the-march trucks), and a complex alert of various shades.
The tests involved 52 participants Placed in a controlled environment, surrounded by 24 hidden altifalals arranged in a circle, inside an anecoic chamber (without echoes). Participants used a controller to indicate the direction from where they thought the sounds came from.
The results were clear: the two -tone signals were the ones that presented worse performanceespecially when there were several simulated vehicles simultaneously. In the scenario with three vehicles with identical sounds, about 40% of participants could not correctly locate more than half of the vehicles.
In contrast, the traditional engine sound was the easiest to locate, even in complex environments, with 87% of participants to identify correctly all vehicles, refers to.
The authors warn of a failure in current safety standards, particularly in the US, where legislation requires vehicles of the same model to issue identical ales – precisely creating the kind of confusion that the study has identified as problematic. The problem is in limited nature of frequencies Simple sounds, which do not provide sufficient directional information to the human auditory system.
The main researcher, Leon Müller, recommends that future Systems AVAS include greater variability in soundsto prevent two vehicles from emitting exactly the same signal. However, it stresses that more studies are needed to define the best approach.
