Matthew Crawford, noted writer and gear head, is not happy about a recent trend in automobile modification:
The new thing is modern V8 muscle cars (Chargers, Challengers, Mustangs and Camaros) with exhaust cut-outs. They are deafening, and they are everywhere where I live in San Jose (which is not one of the genteel areas). They are also illegal, of course. . . For those not satisfied with inflicting low-level hearing loss, a special Platinum A[**]hole feature is available on the aftermarket. It alters the engine’s spark and fuel map to deliberately induce explosive backfires that sound like a 12-gauge shotgun at close range.
We have these cars in our neighborhood though they tend to be heavily modified Camrys, Kias, and other small sedans. He’s right about the modifications to produce backfires, even from ½ mile away it sounds just like an old 12-gauge Mossberg I used to own.
I had always classified such car owners as narcissists, but he cites another possibility:
Julie Aitken Schermer is a professor of psychology, at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She conducted a study of people who modify their cars to make them louder (n=529), using a standard inventory of psychological traits. She was expecting to find narcissism, but what she found instead was “links between folks with a penchant for loud exhausts and folks with psychopathic and sadistic tendencies.”
“The personality profile I found with our loud mufflers are also the same personality profiles of people who illegally commit arson,” she told a reporter. These are people who have a hard time with “higher-order moral reasoning with a focus on basic rights for people.”
Crawford goes on to cite the impact of one particular miscreant in Seattle, the reaction (or lack thereof) of the police to said miscreant, and the impact the guy is having on the neighborhood. Crawford then gets to, for me, the interesting part:
… that the fabric of the world is torn by the small acts of cruelty and unconcern that make everyone else retreat from public space.
This can have an unfortunate resemblance to conquest, if those making a nuisance of themselves recognize one another as like beings, bound up in a common fate, and notice also that the space vacated by those sufficiently annoyed or intimidated is now theirs, collectively.
The interesting concept that Crawford introduces is public space and how it can be disrupted. We Americans typically speak of public space in fairly legalistic terms; what is public property and the things that are and are not permitted therein.
However there is another conception of public space which is defined as the geographic space within which people interact together; it doesn’t have to be a park, publicly owned property, or even a public accommodation such as a grocery store (as found in civil rights law). It can be something as amorphous as where your private property interfaces with public property such as your front yard or your porch (ask your HOA) or a public event such as an Independence Day celebration or a school play. The term “public space” could also be termed “community space.”
A key observation is one that Crawford implicitly makes which is the ability of a very small percentage of the population, if so motivated, to degrade if not destroy that public space. There is the previous example of the modified car owner in Seattle and the impact this man had on the local neighborhood, but it could just as easily be other factors which convey menace and disorder: a street encampment, widespread open-air drug use, or a flash mob. Or…. to use our expanded notion of public space, do you feel safe leaving your car in the driveway or wonder what you’ll see in your front yard in the morning?
Our notion of public space and how we interact with it has changed over the years. It was within our lifetimes that it was expected that men and women dress and in general comport themselves according to certain public social customs. Now that has changed and not only from the sense of crime and disorder on the streets, but also a general lack of courtesy and “social grease” used to smooth interactions among strangers. That problem will loom greater both with more “diversity” and the demarcation of the population into various identity groups that lack a common identity.
Crawford also points to another dimension of public space, transportation, specifically roads and how we interact with it. From his book, Why We Drive:
Before the arrival of automobiles in significant numbers in the 1920s, the urban street was a place dominated by pedestrians, horses, and streetcars that ran on tracks. It was the place where children played—and why not?
We share a public space through the use of our private property, cars. However, transportation, that is how we convey ourselves through public space, is also a matter of public policy and viewed as a strategic choke point by the Left for reconstruction. The street and other parts of the local/regional transportation system are being physically reconstructed, not only to discourage cars and in favor of public transportation but also to drive use of vehicles with limited range such as bicycles and personal mobility scooters. I should also note that the introduction of self-driving cars, their inability to share the streets with human-oriented automobiles, and the introduction of the public space into cars themselves through technological kill switches will have a similar effect.
In addition to the physical dimension, the transportation system is also being socially reconstructed because these alternate methods of transportation are limited in their range and flexibility. This social remodeling will entail, either directly or indirectly, changing the places where we live (“the 15-minute city”) due to our limited ability to travel and our ability to physically access the wider world beyond.
If socially reconstructed ideas of transport sounds suspiciously like the COVID lockdowns and the resultant vision of a “Great Reset” you are not alone.
More on driving and the exercise of citizenship another time. For now, exercise your sovereignty of human agency, gas up your truck, and just go some place far away for the day. Just because, in the wonder that is still 21st Century America, you can and don’t have to justify it to anyone.
You can have my loud car when you pry it from my cold, dead hands. Granted, I don’t have the Pops and Bangs tune on it, so I guess I’m not a sadist.
“… the ability of a very small percentage of the population, if so motivated, to degrade if not destroy that public space.”
In the very far distant past — say, like a quarter of a century ago — the ability of that small minority to degrade the public space was very severely limited by the righteous acts of the majority to squash those who would steal the public space. Nothing has changed about the existence of that selfish minority — they have always been part of the human race. What has changed is the previous willingness of the majority to impose rules of civilized behavior on the minority. We have lost civilizational confidence — and now we are losing civilization itself.
WHISTLE TIPS GO WOO WOOOOOOOO
“Street takeovers”. Mobs of young thugs converge on some location, block traffic and compete in “drifting” their cars and doing “doughnut” spins. There are thousands of these incidents every year. It would not surprise me at all if these cars had intentionally loud exhausts.
When I was living in the rougher parts of San Jose, the boom box/ghetto blaster was the weapon of choice. Since escaping from California, the current grouplet of maladjusted creatures prefer the black-smoke modification for pickup trucks. They call it “rolling coal”, and small cars and/or bicyclists seem to be targets. (OTOH, I’m not in the portion of Oregon where a Subaru has a mandatory Harris-for-commisar sticker, nor rainbow decals. On the gripping hand, the CCW carry rate is fairly high. Heinlein’s comment about an armed society being a polite one does have merit.)
Mercifully, the coal rollers are rare. No idea how big the ticket would be, and some of the LEOs have stealthy cars…
We may eventually get to that armed society. Maybe only in red states after the revolution.
I’ve been riding motorcycles since 1975, and I’ve always had relatively quiet bikes. The best touring bike in the world (okay, I’m biased) is the Honda GoldWing…I put 115,000 miles on my first one (an 1100cc 4-cylinder) and sold it to a friend, then 105,000 miles on my second (a 1500cc 6-cylinder pig) and traded it in on my third, an 1800cc 6-cylinder. I say this since I’ve been touring since the early ’80s, and love riding. Yes, all three were/are black, hence my on-line moniker.
I have never understood the allure of a Harley-Davidson with straight pipes that sound like machine guns going down the road. From a distance it always sounds flatulent, and listening to a group of them go by is actively painful. Why in the gods’ name does somebody want to ride a machine which requires earplugs to prevent you from going deaf? My ‘Wing is not quite silent, but it sounds more like a sewing machine than an explosives test, and we can clearly hear birds calling above the wind and tire noise, which are the loudest things about riding it.
It’s said that, “Loud pipes save lives”, which is utter BS. I cannot count the number of times I’ve save my life on a bike by HEARING what some cage-driving idiot was going to do, for example, by the change in their tire note as they start their swerve to merge squarely into me. I get the heck out of the way, and cuss later. Plus, you don’t piss off everyone around you.
Having done some acoustics testing as part of my engineering work I can safely say that an accurate test of sound levels from either a bike or a loud car would be very difficult to perform in the field (by the side of the road). But having a dedicated test area with calibrated equipment and a trained officer would be stunningly simple and require almost no outlay of money other than a sound meter.. Issue (potential) violators an immediate “test ticket” requiring them to show up THAT DAY (so they cannot re-alter their machines) or lose their license plate. Test the vehicles at idle, half-throttle and full-throttle (or 3/4’s of redline), cutting back sharply each time to see if they’ve been rigged to back-fire. A violation of a very generous sound standard would be easy to make, with zero subjective judgement required by the officer. If the vehicle passes the test, they’re done and no ticket or fine. Upon failing the test they should get a “fix-it” ticket, and again. lose their plates should they fail to fix it within a limited period of time, and not be allowed on the road (except to ride/drive it home and/or to the shop) until it’s repaired and re-tested.
Enforce it with hefty fines for failure to comply (say, a quarter the value of the vehicle) and the streets would very quickly be much quieter.
Unfortunately, the problem isn’t the pipes, it’s the people with the pipes. It’s the people that think it’s a fun way to spend their money.
Most place require motor vehicles to be inspected annually. Most places have a law on the books forbidding these sorts of modifications. Most places don’t enforce those laws, especially against inspection stations that cast a deliberately blind eye. As a rule, the only enforcement by the inspection stations is on items that they can profit by repairing.
Texas has started begging people to please renew their license plates because enforcing registration laws is something that Texas cops just don’t do.
MCS: “Most places don’t enforce those laws”
And THAT is the big problem! Not just for loud vehicles, but almost across the board. It seems that politics attracts the kind of person who loves to get paid to sit in a comfortable place and pass nice-sounding laws … but with zero interest in enforcement. Complete waste of time & energy!
My pet peeve is my county’s “Dark Skies” ordinance — outside lights have to be shaded to point downwards, so that the stars can be seen at night. It is a nice idea, and not an onerous obligation on the homeowner. But the County employees go home at 5 pm, so the regulation is never enforced. Though, in keeping with national practice, they might make an exception to prosecute a Republican.
The street and other parts of the local/regional transportation system are being physically reconstructed, not only to discourage cars and in favor of public transportation but also to drive use of vehicles with limited range such as bicycles and personal mobility scooters.
Cities will be designed for what is good for human beings, not built to what is possible. A new Soviet Person, not a Capitalist Exploiter will result.
That’s the theory, anyway.
“It was within our lifetimes that it was expected that men and women dress and in general comport themselves according to certain public social customs.”
So we had standards of behavior. Unfortunately, standards have been discarded because either 1) people within what we now know as protected demographics couldn’t meet the standards, and we were thus holding them back; or 2) standards are a product of white supremacy and must therefore be removed, so a fairer society can move on.
In either case, majority rule gave way to the tyranny of the minority.
Then there are other noises:
https://nypost.com/2024/09/22/us-news/alabama-nightclub-shooters-used-full-automatic-gun-with-glock-switch-authorities/
Money quote:
‘“There’s a certain element in this community who are too comfortable riding around with semi automatic weapons, automatic weapons, convergent switches, and everything else, whose only hell-bent intent is to harm people,” Woodfin said.’
It doesn’t seem to occur to him (the mayor), that his job is to put that element in prison and keep them there.
If you needed a reminder that the norm for government is incompetence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWOPYcHcgLw
I would think Smelly Exhaust and the need to wend one’s way around ‘deposits’ in some CA cities would be another significant step in eroding the ‘public space’.
With a couple hundred thousand dollars annually budgeted in SF to handle ‘waste deposits’, it would seem that fining those who exhibit a distaste for the use of porta-potties would help ameliorate a budget line that should not exist.
Locally there are some who love to make noise, both two and four wheel vehicles are guilty of exceeding acceptable limits. Situated more than a block from a two-lane with a 45mph limit, I can hear and attest to excessive noise intrusion. Thirty plus years ago I heard a cyclist going down I-680 towards San Jose close to midnight almost nightly. I often wondered what machine could produce that much sound.