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Customized Horn And Movement Sounds Coming To Tesla
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has teased on Twitter that the company’s cars will soon allow for a wide variety of horn and movement sounds, ranging from goats to farts to coconuts. The announcement comes two weeks after another Tesla update. The new update which focused on “entertainment, gaming, music, and convenience features” within the vehicles, according to the company
We’ve had car horns almost as long as we’ve had cars. (Before horns, drivers resorted to using whistles and bells.) The first electric horn, a Klaxon that issued a distinctive “awooga” sound, was installed in 1908. The first iteration of the type of car horn we still use followed two years later.
While cars have to have a working horn, there aren’t any federal regulations on what the horn should sound like. Most state regulations appear to be concerned with sound quality. In California, where Tesla is based, a car horn must be “capable of emitting sound audible under normal conditions from a distance of not less than 200 feet” but also can’t go over 110 decibels.
In other words, there’s a lot of potential ground for customization. It’s possible that the electric Teslas could be limited by laws requiring sound emitters, but Musk said he would “consider” allowing Tesla users to upload their own custom sounds for horns.
The potential for original car horn sounds fun, but, yeah, this is going to get dicey. There’s no solid date yet for the sonic experiment, but it will be easy to hear coming.