27 April

Tiny numbers of people drive all social activity. For example, the ‘love the sound of a combustion engine’ crowd is absolutely tiny, compared to the number of drivers on the road. Listen to all modern cars, the most noise nearly all of them make is the tyres on the road. And one of the most popular selling points of modern cars is their silence, inside and out. Huge research and investment has gone into making them quieter, which also makes them much more efficient (the noise is just wasted energy). And *everybody* tries to live somewhere where you CAN’T hear noisy combustion engines. It’s a train wreck for property values, because the noise is terrible. For this tiny sub-culture of boy racers, that noise has always meant ‘grunt’. That is objectively bananas, in the engineering reality. The noise is wasted energy, it’s the exact opposite of grunt. The louder your car is, the less powerful it is. And yet this TINY group, and the towing crowd (also tiny, and often the same man-babies) dominate the obstructive hysteria we hear about EVs.