> This has been a concern of mine since some friends of my parents got their Prius. On our windy country lanes, it would be so easy to hit someone walking to their mailbox across the street if that person can't hear you coming around a blind corner.

Except the cars aren't silent. As the article points out, hybrids are only quiet when they're running just off of the electric motor, e.g. while idling or at very low speeds. The engine in a hybrid car is a gasoline-fueled internal combustion engine just like most cars on the road and those pistons firing is noisy.

Not only that, but even a fully electric car (such as the proposed hydrogen fuel cell cars) would make noise. The sound of rubber tires moving over streets is pretty distinct. That's not going to go away. The article claims that a hybrid at 35 mph is "quieter than a vacuum cleaner" but I don't exactly consider vacuum cleaners to be very quiet.

(Where does this 75 decibels figure come from, anyway? Do all hybrids make the same amount of noise? That seems like it should defy the laws of physics, but no need to cite the source for entirely questionable statistics -- if it's a number, it must be true! I couldn't handle math, so I became a journalist.)

Frankly I think that linked article kind of sucks. It's a pretty good example of a reporter or editor wanting a story about the danger of something and not being able to find any proof that the something is a danger: it's not until the eighth paragraph that the writer notes there is no evidence the silence of a hybrid car is responsible for even a single accident! "Traffic officials and police" don't even know of any, and the writer can't even find any antecdotal evidence that they may be a problem (the antecdote in the lead is about a close call).

According to the article, more than 200,000 hybrids were sold in the country last year and still the writer can't find anyone who was hit by one because it was silent.

And the antecdotes we do get are hilarious. The engineering manager who was almost when a hybrid "suddenly and complwetely silently moved toward" him. Wow, it's like something out of a horror movie. The car was new and shiny, too. That's the sort of completely pointless details employed by writers everywhere to pad our wordcounts. That story has to be how many inches? Time for more "color!"

Don't these cars have reverse lights to let you know they're backing up? When I'm in my car in a parking lot I usually can't hear the other cars, so I'm forced to look for clues such as lights or sudden movement to alert to me to the presence of other moving vehicles.

Hey, here's some proof of a problem: "some hybrid driving manuals warn owners to be alert when driving near pedestrians." REALLY? I'm going to file that with the great Sony manual that told me not to use my Playstation controller with my head. Here's another great news story: "Cellphones' dangerous drawback." It will be about the danger of drying your phone in the microwave, something I know not to do thanks to the colorful insert that came with my phone. Heck, there are no cases that I know of humans dying from microwaving their phones, but I'll be some "microwave officials" will go on record saying it could be a problem!

Yeah, some "traffic officials" (love that phrase -- are they appointed by traffic? do they oversee traffic?) and cops are worried that it may be a problem. If you've ever talked to a cop you'll quickly learn that they believe, especially when talking to the press, that everything could be a problem. They're a bunch of people who are paid to see the worst-case scenario in everything. I'm still not sure what constitutes a traffic official -- just a pet peeve about journalism is every editor, teacher, etc. in the industry will tell you to "write conversationally" and then immediately add hideous, Frankenstein phrases like "traffic officials" to your copy -- so I don't know if they're pessimists too. I'd wager they are.

My real point is: the article is terrible and hilarious at the same time. Which is why this post went terribly off-topic, but it amused me enough while writing it that I can't bring myself to delete the irrelevant junk.

Stephen