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By Eric J. Leech
Mean Green Machines talks a lot about pollution in the form of toxic wastes spewed into the air from combustion type vehicles, but there is yet another form of pollution such vehicles promote... noise!
How many times have you been enjoying a nice sunny day in the park when a open pipe Harley Davidson motorcycle raced by scarring the birds, squirrels, knocking flower pedals off of the daisy's with its vibrations, and sends an uneasy chill up your spine of what could only be described as irritation.
This is called noise pollution and while it effects the environment in a very different way from regular fossil fuel pollution, it still can have a very negative effect on our environment. This is one of the reasons that many states and counties have developed noise control laws that designate exactly how much noise that a vehicle can legally emit.
This is all fine and dandy from the point of view of an elected official, but in effect this can be a very hard law to enforce as it must rely on police officials to not only worry about speed traps, but also noise decibel traps, which is something that looks much better on paper than it does in real life.
This is of course the other aspect of electric engines, is they produce almost no sound other than the slight whine of the gears. In a sense, it sounds a lot like a larger version of a remote control car. As many people see this as a positive, there are those who see this as bad, claiming that we rely on such noises to warn of us of an approaching vehicle.
But there will always be a negative for everything positive. It would be easy to give these hybrids a little noise if that is what people want. After all, I suppose we have all grown accustomed to noise pollution.
If you think about all the sources of noise pollution that we are use to today, there are a lot of them, such as trains, jet airplanes, diesel trucks, speed boats, lawn mowers, etc. Now think about how much more quiet and serene our world would be without any of that noise.
It would no longer be as much of a sore spot to live next to an airport, busy highway, or train tracks. Sound does actually affect us all in many negative ways, but up until now there has been very little we could have done about it other than better sound proofing insulation or other noises, such as white noise, to cancel out the more annoying sounds.
Electric vehicles are but another step of getting control back over our environment... hallelujah!
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