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Why Electric Cars Are Getting Louder

Electric vehicles are notoriously quiet. But new laws are pushing automakers to experiment with unusual noises.

By Jaclyn Trop
Aug 8, 2020 3:00 PM
charging the car
(Credit: Smile Fight/Shutterstock)

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This story appeared in the September/October 2020 of Discover magazine as "Sound Off." We hope you’ll subscribe to Discover and help support science journalism at a time when it’s needed the most. 


Six years ago, three Volvo engineers sat on a forest floor in western Sweden, picking twigs off the ground and snapping them in half. 

“We were in the woods for two days sampling sounds,” recalls Fredrik Hagman, a sound designer at the company. Three hundred sticks later, they returned to the automaker’s headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden.

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