Elon Musk says that Tesla is working on allowing owners to customize their horns and other sounds made by their cars, including fart and goat noises.
Recently, both the US and EU made it mandatory for electric vehicles to emit a sound at low speed in order to prevent pedestrian accidents.
Automakers have started implementing their solutions.
We previously reported on Jaguar’s system for the I-Pace and Mercedes-Benz’s pedestrian sound system for the EQC electric SUV.
Last month, Tesla started also adding pedestrian sounds to Model 3.
The move is not well-received by everyone as it is seen as affecting one of the advantages of electric vehicles, which is to reduce noise pollution.
But while Tesla is working on the new system to deploy the sound, the company is leveraging it to make it more fun.
CEO Elon Musk says that it will be customizable:
Customized horn & movement sounds (coconuts being one, of course) coming to Teslas soon
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 6, 2019
Musk said that it will include fart and goat noises, which isn’t exactly surprising coming from the first (and only) automaker to have introduced a fart noise machine in their cars.
The CEO said that Tesla would also deliver a directional horn to enable owners to honk backward if needed, like when backing out of a parking spot.
He is even considering giving people the ability to upload their own sound clips to be played on Tesla’s external speaker used for the pedestrian sound.
However, that would be for other sounds than the actual pedestrian sound in some markets where there regulations about the kind of sounds that kind be used.
The new feature was announced after we reported yesterday that Tesla included new Monty Python Easter eggs in its V10 software update, including playing “coconut” sound when using the new ‘Smart Summon’ feature.
Electrek’s Take
This is another example of Tesla focusing on making its ownership experience more “fun”.
I know that this is frustrating to some who would prefer Tesla to focus on fixing existing issues and more important stuff, but I don’t think those small “fun” features are really as big of a strain on the development of other features as they think.
It’s just some fun and it’s not like that’s all that Tesla is doing.
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