UKC

Friday 7th May 2021 was a cracking day for skiing on Meall a Bhuiridh [Glencoe Ski Centre]. Sun and lots of snow. Almost alpine.

It was quite quiet as only the access chair was running. As we were whisked silently upwards from the base station we could hear the insistent call of a cuckoo from nearby. 

We skinned up to just below the summit where we stopped to admire the wonderful views and have a snack. Sitting in the quiet warm sunshine we were saddened to have the spell broken by the distant but insistent high pitched whine of motorbikes screaming along the A82, some 600 meters below us.

It seems obvious that they must be exceeding the allowable legal sound limit but how do they get away with such intrusions on the rest of us? And how might we prevent this from happening?

Hyperacusis is no fun, but I've found that Sony XM3s provide a quick, practical if pricey solution in noisy locales, doubling up as a comfortable earmuff in winter.

 Those f*cking cuckoos are getting out of control and think they can do what they like without consideration for those around them, let alone the damage they inflict to the poor trees. Replacing the woodlands for cannabis growth and peyote fields should settle their annoying calls somewhat

I'm totally with you on this. Creating so much noise just for the hell of it just shows a thuggish lack of consideration for others as far as I'm concerned. Sometimes one feels there's no escape from it. I wonder if it's some kind of infantile attention seeking? Whatever the reason for it, it makes my blood boil.

1) The legal noise limit for motorcycles is almost inaudible from inside a car with windows closed. 

2) “Sorry mate didn’t see you” is the most common excuse made by car drivers after a collision with a motorbike

3) My right to live trumps your intolerance

Loud pipes save lives. Simple as that.  

This is a popular issu atm. Identical thread a couple of weeks ago.

https://www.motorbiscuit.com/new-study-confirms-loud-pipes-save-lives-is-sa...

Everybody else’s right to enjoy the countryside without having to listen to some midlife-crisis idiots making a needless racket trumps your selfish entitlement.

Wow. His right not to be killed is selfish entitlement? 

That the Loud Pipes Save Lives things is almost certainly utter bollocks and that excessively noisy bikes (and cars) are anti-social do not in any way dilute the stupidity and/or inhumanity of your post.

Isn't that what the drivers say after most junction collisions regardless of the vehicles nvolved?

The noise form bikes is horrible at times, I use to have one, though looking back I'd feel guilty inflicting that noise on people now.

Why anyone would want to creat that kind of noise in residential areas and beauty sports is beyond me, it shows zero consideration for others.

Or ‘Motorcyclist riding like tw*t causes accident’. See YouTube for lots of evidence. We experience the Sunday Evening motorcyclist hoover* every week.

*an air ambulance paramedic’s phrase.

Or ‘Motorcyclist riding like tool causes accident’. See YouTube for lots of evidence. We experience the Sunday Evening motorcyclist hoover* every week.

*an air ambulance paramedic’s phrase.

You’ve contradicted yourself completely there. The racket loud exhausts make doesn’t make any difference whatsoever with regards to safety, and I resent having my otherwise peaceful days disrupted because some people are making excessive noise for no reason. It’s just antisocial. 
 

If bikers are that worried about their safety whilst getting from A to B, they should just buy a car. 

It's funny how few of these bikes that have loud exhausts in order to be seen for safety reasons are painted day-glow yellow, with scotch Brite stripes and riders in day-glow pink jackets and day-glow orange helmets.

It's almost like they don't care so much about being seen, and care more about making enough noise to give them a semi while they ride.

Bullshit. You don't hear a bike until it has passed you. Not riding like a prick saves far more lives than a loud can ever will.

I'm over 150k miles on 2 wheels 99% of the time I have come close has been my fault. I have also attended far too many funerals and I only know of one where it was nothing to do with the rider. 

I had the joy of handing over a crashed biker whose neck I was having to brace to the air ambulance paramedics last year. 
I’m not sure what impact his loud exhaust had on his inability to take a corner at stupidly high speeds, but it was definitely his helmet that saved his life when he headbutted a fence post before he nearly slid under my oncoming truck wheels. 

Good to see you've come to realise the f*ckwittery of your going around the countryside firing shotguns into animals for fun.

P.s. Cuckoos are fair game

If this was true the casualty rates wouldn't  be so high

Is the hope that the sound waves will disintegrated the dry stone wall before the biker slams in to it?

The statistics on single vehicle accidents on motorbike vs cars are quite stark.  

Round here it's groups of youth, late at night, particularly enjoying over-revving at traffic lights.

Annoying to the point I fantasize about a large caliber precision rifle with a nice scope, but then I consider similar stupid things I did at that stage in life and figure I both deserve the karma and that I'd rather live in a world of rebellious teenagers than not. Maybe they'll get it through their system and not become the middle aged wankers you seem to have identified in Glencoe. 

That's probaby serious accidents though, as in a rider will be seriously hurt when he meets that dry stone wall, whereas the car driver will just shoot off hoping nobody saw them knock the wall down and gets just a bodyshop bill for the rapid unscheduleded acquaintance.

The most common cause of motorbikes accidents is still the 'sorry mate i didn't see you' kind. (Otherwise known as 'you guys drive like crazy', 'you came out of nowhere' or 'its your fault i put the indicator on'). The most well known studies put the figures for multi-vehicle accidents at 75% of bike accidents and the 'i didn't see you' figure at 70% of those

Small w#lly syndrome. 

I wonder if motorbikes will get swept up in the great electric revolution like cars? If they do and largely become silent will that dent the appeal of riding them fast? I suspect the noise is half the appeal of rising fast on a motorbike. 

Not sure what the law says on this but there are ev motor bikes already. When I was looking at them they were a bit too expensive at the moment. The HD looks cool, but I'd like to have gone for a Zero motorbike.

On the loud pipes save noise, I was taught use your horn.

I think it will be a long time before electric bikes are viable for me. I'm an adventure tourer rider, I can't sit on sports bikes or naked like the street triple etc. Zero do one but it's physically too small and no bike has anything like a decent range.

For the average rider 100 mile range is great, they can go from home to their local Biker hotspot (normally 20 miles max) and strut round in their race rep leathers (with extra leather for the belly bulge) and tell tall tales about getting their knee down on the corner then go home again.

For me though it's 200 mile minimum before I would consider one, 150 mile between stops is my normal MO with a 50 mile buffer. 

And yet, the lived experience of thousands of bikers demonstrated the complete opposite. 

Not pertinent whatsoever to my point. 

Filtering in traffic, a few blips of the throttle has car drivers looking around, checking mirrors, checking the blind spot. Drivers will often ease over to create a path. Have you never ridden in traffic?

I’d quit while you’re ahead then pal. Sounds like you’re a static waiting to happen.

Another straw man argument. Casualty rates are high because motorcyclists don’t have a protective shell around them. Not disputing that. But do away with loud pipes and the casualties would be higher.

Loud pipes are there to be *heard*, not *seen*. You know, because sound is not processed by our eyes.

You hear the sound then look around for the source. Thus spotting the bike and rider. 

Several times more pertinent than for car driving.  As Lopez says however cars are the biggest hazard to motorcyclists - although I would say the biggest external hazard, as the stats on age and gender speak for themselves - the car may be at fault but defensive riding guards against that significantly.  If it worked, a loud exhaust could be considered a passive form of defensive riding I suppose.

More pertinent; a lot of accidents happen when a bike is t-boned when a car driver looks but doesn’t see them - “failure to look properly” rather than “failure to look”.   Considering the geometry of the situation including the approach angle, the way an exhaust is not an omni directional transmitter but one that mostly sends sound in the wrong direction, the attenuation of sound with distance, speeds, stopping distances and reaction times, a loud exhaust makes FA difference.  It’s a “failure to look properly” not a “failure to look”; in most cases the car drivers does look (they’re not always crashing in to cars at this rate) but doesn’t see.  Training car drivers over the significant pitfalls of human vision would be a start to fixing this; automated safety features will get there first I expect.

As you’re such a passionate believer in passive defensive riding measures like noise, I presume you’re also passionate about wearing highly visibility clothing and always ride in a high vis vest and helmet?

Indeed, but there’s serious suggestions a lot of single vehicle accidents are reported for motorbikes, and whilst cars are still the dominant source of accidents, the number of SVAs is significantly larger.  Alcohol is also a much larger factor (almost 3x) and the links to age and gender if the rider are very strong - despite a car also being involved much of the time and often found at fault.  

This tells quite a story around defensive riding; that could be taken as victim blaming.  I’ve been t-boned off a motorbike in my youth, thankfully didn’t die.  When it’s so easy to become a victim (about 20x the chance of death as a car driver), when it comes to staying alive the question of who is legally at fault is moot in the moment, and staying alive isn’t.  If you look at the people statistically least likely to do, I don’t think they’re relying on loud exhaust pipes but defensive riding techniques. If a rider puts themselves in a position where they expect their exhaust to save their life, they’re not doing it right.

I'm not thick, I understand the mechanism by which you're claiming to be trying to get yourself noticed.

When I go out on my bicycle, I wear high vis for safety reasons. If I could make a lot of noise while I rode, I would still wear high vis, because being highly visible means once a driver has heard you, they can locate you quicker, and it means that drivers with hearing impairment, drivers listening to high volume techno music, and drivers who can't hear you because you're both going in the same direction and they have their windows down and a lot of wind noise can see you.

Therefore, I simply don't believe that safety is the genuine reason when the vast majority of motorbike riders with loud exhausts don't try to help their chances of being seen further by wearing high viz clothing and painting their bikes high vis.

Also, I'm not yet too old to remember my younger days 😁

The only time I've ever noticed loud bikes is when I'm not in the car and they're ragging it along a straight, empty road like the stretch of the A82 John heard them on. Hard to see how that qualifies as a safety feature.

What you really need to consider here is the lived experience of the car drivers, not the bikers. Whether they hear you or not is the clincher for the lpsl argument and it seems they don't.

As a one time rider, who could return if finances allow, your comments disgust me.

Also you seem to be making a good case for outlawing motorcycles if you are suggesting the only way they can be ridden safely is with a loudener on them.

I did not have a hugely noisy bike, but having some engine noise has occasionally in the past stopped some car drivers part-way in the process of pulling out on me, when I was already half-way past them. (This happened even though I always rode with my headlights on). Sometimes it did not make any difference, and I have had to end up almost in the ditch on the other side of the road.

Saving lives happens more when car drivers actually look behind them (mirrors, and preferably if uncertain, turning head), and being aware that there are other road users behind, who may be swifter to take opportunities and actions than them. ( I have had the same scenario in my car too).

I do not ride anymore.

Nor do I, but I find myself increasingly disappointed in modern cars built for the "Playstation Generation" and I find my thoughts drifting back to two wheels on more than the odd occasion.  

Very tempting, but I would probably have some sort of problem, as my head turning is not good enough, with a plate (from climbing) in my neck. Yet climbing is not too bad with the restricted neck movement.

I have just been thinking back on vans that I have owned and the miles they had on them when I sold them. As well as the 150k on 2 wheels I'm about 800k on 4 wheels. The only time I can remember hearing a bike before seeing it has been big V twin bikes like Harleys. The rest you don't hear until they are actually passing you. 

Lots of riding in traffic, I have never had a problem filtering on bikes with quiet exhaust. 

I think I'm doing okay thanks. In 150k miles I have come off twice, once when another Biker took me on a corner and binned his bike 6 foot in front of me. I had nowhere to go but in to him, well I actually came to a stop on top of him. The other one was riding in a foot of snow at 5 mph, wheels slid out. I have had close calls but always stayed upright. 

As I put on another thread on this subject, back in the day I had a very loud can, it was loud enough that anyone who heard it knew instantly that I have a 12 inch penis. Once I realised how much noise pollution it caused I swapped it back for the standard can and now people think I have a 6 inch penis. That's okay though, if I need to prove different I can just whip it out and slap people with it. 

What has the most credibility. A scientific test carried out under controlled conditions or a bunch of random people trying to justify their midlife crisis.

Ever noticed the correlation between a loud pipe and a numberplate the size of a beer mat? 

I suspect for a great deal of riders the sound is irrelevant. When you consider the wind speed, the helmet, the wind noise and engine noise you can’t hear a lot. I suspect going around corners in full 3D is the major attraction of riding a bike fast.

I assume the same safety principle applies to driving around with your windows down pumping out shite music at full volume. And all this time I thought they were just being dickheads.

True enough, I don't really know what any of my bikes sound like when I'm riding them unless I go beside a wall or in a tunnel. One of them is a KTM 450 EXC so with a (legal) 93db exhaust which is kind of on the noticeable side, put a microphone right beside the end of the silencer and you can just hear it over the tyre noise.

The big problem is it's hard to do a realistic roadside test since there's no load on the engine, the  certification test is also a full power ride-bye which you can't do.

Harleys are the worst, slow AND loud. Light aircraft of course far worse, about time they banned them.

I was a bike rider for 20 years, only quit due to threat of divorce. Rode a classic brit amongst others, MAG member, all that stuff. Very familiar with the "loud pipes save lives" argument. I even went along with it for a while. It's crap. It might save the odd pedestrian, but in busy traffic it's just lost in the background. Car drivers don't hear it and look round, they carry on with whatever they were doing. It's just another noisy bike and they don't look to see where it is.

On the other hand, noisy bikes really piss people off. Like really really annoy them. It makes people hate bikers and try and restrict where they go. Many a time I've had friends say to me in an embarrassed tone that they really can't stand "my lot" - ie. bikers. I have to explain that these are not " my lot", they are arseholes with bikes.

If we as bikers (and I still consider myself a biker at heart) want to be treated with respect then we need to behave in a respectable fashion and not go round on illegal vehicles pissing people off.

That's true for sports bikes. For most people the great appeal is the cornering, with acceleration a close second. They seem to like the noise, but I think most riders wouldn't be put off by a quiet bike. It's not a major part of the appeal.

Harleys on the other hand, why the f does anyone ride one? Slow and cumbersome, it can't be for the actual riding. I think it really is all about mid life crisis men playing at being a Hell's Angel. For them the noise is a big part of the deal.

Well this really has stirred some debate. It’s also demonstrated how poor some people’s debating skills are. Pity. 

Yawn. You know damn well that is a whole different proposition but if it makes you feel better to set up a straw man argument, knock yourself out. Literally if possible 🤣

I quite like the noise, not from an environmental perspective, but because other people are enjoying themselves, its a bit like jet-ski's. They seem to have a disproportionate ability to piss people off and yet other people get a thrill from using them. You can choose to be grumpy about and let it spoil your day or you can think, thats great, those people are really having a good time.

Yup.

Completely uncalled for.

I fookin hate jet-skis. Has there ever been a case of someone owning one who wasn't a total wanker?

The moral argument for people's right to enjoy themselves has to weigh up the numbers on both sides. An illegal rave with thousands having a good time while a few get kept awake all night - A good case for being morally acceptable. One person having a good time, ruining the peace and quiet for hundreds? No chance.

If you want some proper debate, how about some evidence to back this up?

My lived experience as a biker was that changing from a Bonneville with straight through pipes (loud) to a Trident with stock pipes (quiet) made absolutely no difference to the number of cars pulling out in front of me. I knew a bunch of couriers at the time (who did massive mileage in town and know all about dodging cars) and they always said the loud pipes thing was bullshit. They all kept their bikes legal to avoid the hassle.

The only time when a loud pipe might make a bike more noticeable is when the dickhead riding it is tailgating a car as they seek an opportuity to execute a dodgy overtake!

The point I was trying to make was that being pissed off by noise that lasts a relatively short period of time is a choice. I choose not to let it wind me up, the motorbikes, jet-skis, low flying aircraft are only a passing annoyance. As I've mellowed into middle age I've found its very easy to let trivial things you have no control over annoy you. If you tell yourself its only temporary and its balanced by someone else enjoying themselves I find it doesn't really bother me. Being wound up and letting it ruin your day is a pointless exercise.

Have you ever considered fitting a horn, a jolly toot toot would achieve the same result without disturbing others for the rest of your ride.

It depends where you live, on a sunny weekend we can hear brummies playing on their bikes them all around us for large portions of the day.

Why bother tailgating when you can just pull out on a blind bend/opposite a junction/across a double centreline/any other shit spot to overtake then blame a car driver for “not seeing you” when you’re in a road position nobody would expect you to be in?

I drive quite a bit, ride a bike* quite a bit and live in a rural area besieged with caravans, tractors and people on motorbikes for a day out. The motorbikers are by far and away the most dangerous road users of the lot in my experience.

*for clarities sake, I mean I proper bike. I.e. one without an engine. 

A horn, whether on a motorcycle or a bicycle, is about as much use as the proverbial chocolate teapot.

They really don’t. Horns are way too quiet and go unnoticed.

Oh sorry. I’ve not been posting long enough I guess. That was intended to be humourous.

Registered September 2020, nowt but a bairn, who says "peaks"  

I often wonder whether motorbikes actually idle, because at traffic lights etc they’re always having the throttle blipped. 

They don't have to be quiet, maybe you should fit a decent one or get a bit less lardy and use the weight saving to fit two

In some people's eyes, the Glencoe Ski lift and related man made fixtures don't have a rightful place in a natural landscape, I can remember being a kid and seeing something about it on TV, some outdoor people, when asked if it was okay since it was just in one part of the landscape, using a picture of the Mona Lisa and drawing tippex on a corner of it to illustrate their point of view.

Some people have loud bikes, and others support infrastructure like the Glencoe Ski Resort though using it, I guess whether they're acceptable could come down to one's perspective?

I don't feel strongly about either, I can just remember people being opposed to the ski resort.

My first thought were sound activated shotgun mounts on the side of the road that shoot the rider in the backside because anything else might be dangerous...

More reasonably have mobile sound traps like speed traps. Too loud - take a sound measurement and a photo like a speed trap or flag them down further down the road.

You may joke, but this is exactly what some ******* moron in BMW's marketing department did to the i8.  They assumed someone buying a rear engined almost-supercar wants to hear the 1.5 L, 3-cylinder engine in mono amplified through shitty speakers coming from in front of them.  

(I just googled it and it seems the rot has spread to other cars, but they've added an option in iDrive to turn it down.  What the actual **** is wrong with people?).

I know what you mean, it's a mantra I use most days in summer, it's just someone else enjoying the self their way.

The problem I have is living on what is arguably the most famous road trip of all at the moment, the NC500, the problem is after that minute or so of noise comes another, and so on all day every day in peak season. What the North West Highlands had is now lost for months a year perhaps irrevocably. The noise neatly coincides with the breeding bird season and the wild feeling of, say torridon is gone. An teallach, liathach, even bivvying on a mhaighdean has been blighted by noise.

Understood the pleasure of biking and have been wondering of there is any way to square the circle of allowing everyone to enjoy themselves, not to mention the effects on wildlife. 

It's not just the i8, it's on all the bloody M and M lite cars and despite being able to adjust virtually everything  else through idrive, it's apparently an hour long faff to stop fake engine noise being piped into the cabin. Having bought one of the affected cars last month, partly on the strength of it being a total sleeper with a fabulous (and fabulously quiet) engine, I'm rather put out that I'm being subjected to such deceitful fakery. 

What the actual **** is wrong with some people? Most are happy to part with needless noise when they lose interest in their baby rattle.

I grew up in the lune valley a few miles north of devils bridge, where these degenerates congregate every weekend. I stopped riding my road bike at weekends as it wasn't safe.

My parents house is 200m above the valley and a mile from the road with a good view of around 4 miles of it. Good weather weekends you hear bikes continuously from around 10am to 6 pm and it ruins the place.

Usually a couple of times a summer the ambulance has to come and scrape bits of biker off the road. Years ago a neighbour had a biker overshoot a corner and hit him. Helmet was removed along with the contents. Luckily he has a strong constitution and wasn't too traumatised by it.

I should  admit that I like engine noises but, like fireworks, for a limited time and at sensible levels.

If you live by a sea loch you get the pleasure hearing them travelling along both sides. By the time Idiot A had departed the scene, Idiot B and chums have arrived.

When I used to commute into central London by bicycle, fitting a Zound air horn greatly improved my chances of getting home without a near death experience. 

The drivers are very used to hearing car horns from behind or whatever and not taking them seriously, but a toot from the side when they haven't realised someone is there usually results in a very swift and surprised moment away.

More effective, in fact, than booting the door with a stiff soled road shoe.

I think the high pitch of the horn definitely helped, as it's a bit out of the ordinary.

I like engine noise too (within reason) but only as a genuine expression of the engineering involved and the power being generated. I've a similar attitude to fake tits, tans and teeth, the artifice involved repels rather than attracts.

Sense of humour is totally banned on UKC 🏍💥

"Well, false eyelashes and false foundation , they may heal your pride

But don't gimme no Plastic Saddle (E1 5c) I like to feel the leather when I ride....."

It would be interesting to know what the  proportions are with bikes with loud exhausts. I'd guess vastly more crashes are single vehicle in this group.

I used to live.on the Snake pass Rd. There were 2-3 accidents every summer weekend, regularly fatal,  involving loud bikes speeding. Utterly selfish, bordering insane riding was the norm.

I directly witnessed a couple. Most memorable being a loud, blinged up bike trying to overtake me on a blind bend. Sure enough another bike came the other way, so the overtaker, rather than braking, attempted to mount the verge on the offside, with predictable results.

Those of us who spend time in France must be aware of the teenagers who have removed the exhausts from their 50cc scooters. I'm pretty sure they do it because it's either "cool" or because they think they get an extra 1% power from their engine as a result - nothing to do with not getting run over.

The noise they generate actually hurts when they're ragging through town at a snail's pace.

Ban them all.

I used to occasionally ride a bicycle along the Cat and Fiddle road so no radio or car body to muffle sounds. With a gentle breeze I wouldn't hear a motorbike until they were in the process of overtaking me when the excessive sound of the exhaust would give me the fright of my life. Therefore, I do not believe that motorbike exhaust noise is a useful safety feature, for the biker or anyone else, as it does not help you hear a motorbike coming towards you

Classic UKC thread this one - reminds me very much of the "Is cycling with headphones on safe?" thread a while back with one poster doggedly defending their viewpoint while everyone else stands at the sides and chucks virtual tomatoes at them.  Good to see a good cross section of UKC favourites weighing in - welcome back Stitchplate!

Respect to Lardy Punter for apologising when they got the tone wrong on some humour.

Anyways so given three people have talked about their lived experience on the thread, can anyone tell me what's the difference between 'lived experience' and 'experience'?

Bl**dy hell - why don't you just google it I asked myself and wikipedia gave me this...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lived_experience#:~:text=In%20addition%20live.... Which said "In addition lived experience is not about reflecting on an experience while living through it but is recollective, where experience is reflected on after it has passed or lived through".  

I'm not totally sure I'm any clearer.

Also edited to add I just remembered I used it myself the other day!

Absolute tangent sorry.

I don't recall the cycling with headphones argument being as one sided as you make out.

Edit. The one you started on May 19 does seem to have a tendency towards condoning the practice  but I'm sure there was a more recent discussion where the opinions about headphones for pedestrians and cyclists came under the spotlight and opinions seemed more evenly balanced: my neighbour had just been put into an induced coma near Christmas after a collision with a car while she was crossing the road wearing headphones and I mentioned this. It was probably a pub debate.

" how might we prevent this from happening"

How about "the polluter pays", the louder the bike, the higher the road tax. ?

I wonder if the rider actually hears it.

There was an outbreak of noisy crap cars yesterday - mainly of the lowered nova/fiesta type with exhausts tuned to sound like a giant wet fart. The noisy they make is entirely disproportionate to the speed they go and their main contribution to perfomance is to drive like total wankers.

An independent observations was the louder the car, the uglier the driver.

A few years back, I noticed electric mopeds in Berlin.

They just looked like ordinary road legal moped/scooter (the sort with "bodywork" rather than visible engine). No difference other than quiet.

They looked like a very practical urban vehicle, maybe even store indoors as no smell of petrol.

^^This.  You can ride a 50cc at 14 here and they're a nightmare. The law says they mustn't exceed a certain horsepower, then at 16 you can de-restrict them. However, so many kids were buying secondhand de-restricted bikes without knowing it the Police now turn a blind eye. it's one thing hearing a sportsbike moving up through the gears but the constant ear-splitting buzz of the scooters is horrible.

What is with the backfiring approach which seems so popular nowadays? Loud crap cars seem to have multipled recently with them struggling to make 30mph and hence inflicting their crap on everyone for even longer.

There are several top end car showrooms round here so quite often some expensive stuff driving around. Sometimes see some fiesta thing making lots of noise alongside a far quieter aston/porsche/mclaren/lamborghini and wonder if the drivers ever get embarassed about it.

At my previous house the guy down the road had a fat pipe on his car. Nice guy and he eventually sold it when getting wed. Always used to ask him when he was going to get it fixed as obviously no car would deliberately sound that bad.

Yeah I can't find it now,  so perhaps it was in the pub.  I remember it as there was a very experienced cyclist who said "No, your ears will not stop a collision, your eyes will" and everyone else said "Your crazy!".  I think he had a point but let's not go there again : )

Typically the result of a "Pops & Bangs" remap. Now you can get your car remapped for extra power or you can get it remapped to make a lot of noise and shoot flames out of its arse. Choose the second option and you get the added benefit of using way more fuel, knackering your spark plugs and clogging up your exhaust. 

I have no idea why so many drivers choose option two.

If you can make the time and effort to glue an ST badge on the back of a 70 BHP Fiesta then you're probably impervious to embarrassment.

No, that is now the norm. To make sure the cars sound right, a modified grunty bass version of the engine is put out over the ICE or a dedicated speaker even if you think the ICE system is off or you are listening to something. This allows the engineers/marketing team to edit/adjust the engine sound according to the "driver experience" they are designing. I call it fake BS, but they call it...   https://www.ingenia.org.uk/Ingenia/Articles/195e5fcf-169a-4935-9f6e-d421ee3...

If you can afford a supercar, you can afford a re-engineered classic instead (with good brakes, better suspension, and close to modern reliability). I've no idea why people with cash to burn buy new supercars, but sadly which supercar to buy isn't a big problem in my life right now

Probably because they are chav halfwits who want everybody on their estate to think they’ve got the fastest car (and therefore a huge willy). 

It's just so utterly, utterly depressing.  One car marker puts the speakers on the firewall / bulkhead apparently to make it sound more authentic. I was trying to think of positives.  At least the Physicists doing the audio modelling have a job here and so didn't have to go and work for an enemy nuclear weapons program?  Otherwise I'm all out of ideas.  Being in an i8 made me want to set fire to it, the tinny mono engine noise coming from the wrong place was so incessant and awful.  What is wrong with these people?

A McLaren 570S has a list price about half that of a decent re-engineered E-Type.   It could be quite the dilemma, that.

Indeed.

Very loud exotica is relatively common round here. I'm not sure what it says about me that I like the sound of a Ferrari accelerating between two sets of lights but hate hearing souped up Hondas with exhausts the size of the Mersey Tunnel. Though I do occasionally get fed up of hearing yet another jet-fighter rivalling Stuttgart flat 6 rattling my windows. Some supercars are definitely as loud as bikes. 

Apparently you can buy a brand-new Mk2 Escort for £60k now.

I once came very close to hitting a biker whilst pulling out of a junction.

Having looked both ways I didn't see anything coming so started turning but slammed on the brakes as I glimpsed a biker coming extremely fast down my side of the road. I only saw him / her as they contrasted against a passing white lorry, if the lorry hadn't been there it could have been fatal. By the time I looked left the biker was almost out of sight but I could hear them disappear off into the distance.

At no point did I hear them approaching.

Speed kills. Noise irritates. 

it's all getting a bit confusing. Just read about a proposed restomod of a Maserati Shamal ( an absolute favourute of mine) but the ironic thing is the people putting forward this idea are Maserati themselves.

A lot of folk will be on elec mopeds for commuting etc in the future I think

Never seen one until recently, now I'm seeing them all the time for pizza, just eat, etc, same story with electric bicycles.