Noisy Hybrids?

Chris Matyszczyk wrote an article for c|net news today ("Do Hybrid Cars Kill You with Silence?") which pointed out that the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) is looking for ways of increasing safety related to hybrid cars.  As it turns out, hybrids traveling at slow speeds are more likely to hit pedestrians or cyclists; because they make very little noise, those they are running into don't hear them coming.

So, this summer, the NHTSA will be creating guidelines for the minimum amount of noise that a vehicle can make on the road.  Once these standards are in place, those quiet electric cars will have to have noise-makers installed ... for safety reasons.

Until reading this article, I hadn't thought about this as a safety concern.  I have only ridden in such a car on a few occasions, so I haven't had much occasion to ponder their special challenges.  But this reminded me of something else I have often wondered about:  hubcap spinners.  These are the (quite silly, in my opinion) hubcaps that spin independently of the wheel ... so they will generally rotate slower than the wheel when the vehicle is moving, and they will often continue slowly spinning when the vehicle has stopped.

When I first saw these, several years ago, my first thought was ... well ... unflattering.  But my second thought, which came very quickly, had to do with safety.  This happened because the first time I recall seeing spinner hubcaps was on a car at an intersection I was about to cross ... and I was trying to figure out whether the vehicle had stopped (as it should have, based on the traffic signal) or not.  I realized, almost immediately, that one of the ways that I determine whether a car is moving is by looking at the rotation of the wheels.  I would suspect that I'm not alone in this.

Under some circumstances, of course, a car could be moving even though it's wheels are not turning ... if it is sliding on icy or wet pavement, for example.  But under normal and dry road conditions, the rotation of the wheel is an indicator of the movement (and relative speed) of the vehicle.  This is one of those visual cues we may not be aware of ... until something like a spinner hubcap throws our perception into doubt.

The hubcaps seem to be falling out of favor.  I would offer a heartfelt, "Good riddance."  But I wonder how often they contributed to accidents -- because other motorists were unable to gauge the speed of the vehicle sporting those attachments.  And that leads me to wonder why they were allowed in the first place.

Maybe some people thought it looked cool.  It was novel, I suppose.  But being cool or novel shouldn't trump safety considerations.  I'd vote for banning spinner hubcaps ... and I'll wait to see what sorts of sounds hybrid cars start emitting before I pass judgment on that development.