Elon Musk hints Tesla owners will be able to choose custom horn sounds

Elon Musk says Tesla owners may soon be able to choose fart and goat sounds as customized horns on the cars

  • The feature will ensure people can hear the quiet cars at low speeds
  • Musk jokes that initial sound options could include goat bleats and coconuts
  • One of possible sounds points to Monty Python-reference, a Tesla favorite 

Tesla owners will soon be able to customize the sound of their car horns, according founder Elon Musk.

Just what kind of customizable options will be available are unclear, but on Twitter he suggested the range might include goat bleats, fart noises and the sound of clacking coconut shells.

The coconut sound is a reference to Monty Python and The Holy Grail, which features a character named Patsy.

On Twitter, Tesla founder Elon Musk (pictured above) hinted at a new feature that will let Tesla owners choose their own horn sounds and a low-speed warning sound to make up for the car’s quiet engines. 

Patsy uses coconuts to simulate the sound of horse hooves as his master, King Arthur, rides an imaginary horse.

In addition to horn options, the new features will likely make the cars compliant with the Pedestrian Enhancement Safety Act of 2010.

The US law that requires electric vehicles to emit a noise when traveling at speeds lower than 19 miles per hour to compensate for the relative silence of their engines.

Musk indicated on Twitter that he would potentially be open to letting customers uploading their own sound files.

Tesla has embraced user customization in a number of ways, accessible from the car’s touchscreen control panel. 

NEW FEATURES IN TESLA’S SOFTWARE VERSION 10.0

Tesla Theater: Users can accesses Netflix, Hulu and YouTube

Karaoke: New feature ‘Car-aoke’ has a large music and song library that supports multiple languages 

Smart Summon: Owners can activate their car to come to them or a specific destination without being inside. 

This might create a new set of legal compliance issues in Europe, where the law mandates electric vehicles should sound like vehicles in a similar category that feature combustion engines.

US laws on car noises are comparatively less strict, mandating only that a horn shouldn’t be unreasonably lour or harsh.

There have been a number of Monty Python references woven into Tesla software over the years.

One owner named his car ‘Rabbit of Caerbannog,’ a character from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and found the car’s controls included a shortcut to a YouTube clips from the movie.

European Tesla owners might be constrained by the EU’s stricter regulations on what car horn noises compared to US regulations.

Another found code describing a ‘Patsy Mode’ in Tesla’s Android App, a likely reference to the coconut clacking character.

Musk might find the public reception to the horn sounds slightly better than the public reaction to his claims that he had nearly perfected the technology for driverless cars.

Raj Rajkumar, from Carnegie Mellon University, says that the California company’s new Smart Summon feature was ‘far from perfection’ and he can ‘only laugh’ at Musk’s prediction that the selfdriving feature would be ready by next summer.

Musk speaking at a Tesla event in March, 2019.

A number of Twitter users began posting pictures and footage of the test feature malfunctioning in their own tests, leading to near crashes or minor fender-benders with parked cars.

Earlier this year, a former employee at one of Musk’s factories claimed the entrepreneur is ‘full of s**t’ and ‘will tell you anything you want to hear.’

That story emerged along with reports of solar panels produced at SolarCity, a Tesla subsidiary that produces solar panels, had caught on fire and triggered a lawsuit from WalMart, which alleged ‘utter incompetence’ after purchasing solar panels from the company.

 

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