Electric cars are wonderfully quiet. If you’re in it, at least. Test measurements show that many electric cars, including Teslas, sometimes even produce more noise than the average car, and therefore more than a large number of cars with a combustion engine.
First the good news: on average, cars have become quieter over the past five years. When you compare the new sales of 2018 and 2022, it appears that the average noise level in the official measurements has decreased from 70 to 67.7 decibels. This would appear from figures from the German Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt (KBA). Electric models help with this, but some electric car manufacturers actually do worse than average by making heavy and fast accelerating vehicles.
Lynk&Co
The reduction of 2.3 decibels (dB) in five years sounds like a drop in the ocean, but a drop of three dB already means a halving of the sound power. However, that does not mean that sound is perceived as half as loud. This is only the case with a sound reduction of 10 dB, it said RIVM. Yet car manufacturers are on the right track with this, it seems.
Remarkably enough, the growing share of electric cars does not play a major role in the decline. That’s because they aren’t as quiet as you might expect. In fact, Tesla is one of the noisiest cars in the KBA statistics and, at 68.9 decibels, is clearly above average loud. The electric brand Lynk&Co from China is very quiet, with an average of 65.1 decibels.
Electric motor just hums
But where does the sound come from when an electric motor just hums? E-cars are usually heavier than comparable internal combustion engine units due to the extra battery weight. They also accelerate extremely quickly. “This leads to much louder rolling noise from the tires, even if the engine itself is not that loud,” says Michael Ebert of TÜV Süd to the news agency dpa. According to the German Federal Environmental Agency, even in classic combustion cars, tire noise surpasses the engine from 30 km/h, at least for people outside the vehicle.
Warning system for electric cars is mandatory
The engines are therefore the main source of noise only in slower city traffic. Here, electric cars have the opposite problem: they are actually considered dangerously quiet at these kinds of speeds because they are not so easy to hear as they approach. A warning system with acoustic signals up to 20 km/h has therefore been mandatory since 2021.
The real troublemakers are mainly cars from sports car brands Porsche and Ferrari. In the measurements they sometimes score values above 70 decibels. And some models are even above the EU limit of 71 decibels for high-performance vehicles, which will apply from 2024.
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