How Should Electric Vehicles Sound? - BBC Click

[Music] this week poetry bot writes a classic electric trunk goes around the bend and it's time we stop hey what's that sound [Music] [Music] noisy isn't it pardon i said it's noisy it's been the bane of our lives for as long as i can remember trying to film next to busy roads and having to fight the noise of the traffic but in a few years time it will be replaced by this [Music] electric cars are not only good for the planet but they're also good for our ears not that everyone minds but of course there is a problem if electric cars don't make a sound you can't hear them coming [Music] over the past two years new british eu and us laws have required that for safety reasons all new electric vehicles must be fitted with a device that makes a noise and the car world is getting excited about the idea of on brand unique sounds in fact you could say it's generated a bit of a buzz and a beep and a boop all right all right and some makers are even composing special soundscapes at different speeds for the driver inside the cabin so dan simmons has been driving a little bit slower than usual it has to be said to find out what might replace the sound of silence [Music] if electric cars have to make a noise well we could end up with something like this well you wouldn't accidentally step out in front of it would you this is an art experiment to see how cars could interpret and complement the soundscape around them more on that idea in a bit but first to get a feel of what the ev manufacturers themselves have in store for us i've come to japanese car giant nissan's technical development center in bedfordshire what do you think people expect an electric car to sound like that was the interesting question that we started with what should a car sound like because none of us had really thought about it it just sounds like the engine the leaf is one of the world's best-selling electric cars and they now come with nissan's reimagined suite of sounds called kanto we wanted to be optimistic a little bit futuristic but not to pretend to be anything that the car wasn't we didn't want to pretend to be a petrol engine and we ended up putting three together and then melding sounds together and building from there a profile of different sounds that would work with the car [Music] not all new leafs will sound the same we're the first tv crew to be invited into nissan's top secret semi-anechoic chamber and paul's the man in charge of testing the sounds and tweaking them to different markets because it turns out different countries have different ideas of what good quality sounds like in europe we attribute quality with a more sort of solid feel so more like a low frequency content like a solid closing of an oak door is a good quality sound in japan they tend to be slightly more biased towards higher frequency sounds and that's more because that's that's where their language operates like the motorcycle engines higher revving turbocharged engines would be a high quality sound so there's different tastes in different markets here's hyundai's virtual engine sound system in the new ioniq of course each brand of electric car will want to make a slightly different sound perhaps a sound that tells you it's their vehicle that's coming but to some that's sounding an alarm [Music] yep that is a fart noise making customizable sounds for your tesla has caused a social media storm since what the firm called a boom box was added to recent models okay so let's enable driving sound now in europe these only work when the car is stationary but in the us well you can broadcast any sound you like while on the move now that taxi idea doesn't seem so far-fetched does it one of the guys behind the art project is sound designer yuri suzuki and if you can imagine like a current electric car the leader to be quiet it can be terrifying as an independent consultant to the auto industry he thinks our cars should adapt to what we're doing and when [Music] beauty of the electric car is actually we don't have to choose one standardized sound at all like it's really depends on the time and the usage of the car has a totally different like soundscape you can create as well here's the car's startup sound in the morning and it's horn and this is what they sound like at lunchtime [Music] and here they are at night [Music] and it's you is dream that the cars we drive while not all sounding the same may perhaps harmonize and create a soundscape we want to hear sounds a bit far-fetched well maybe not i can't say that i've already implemented it because my ensemble consists of bmw mini and rolls royce and if you one day a bmw and mini rolls-royce would meet at a traffic light they would be in harmony i'm in munich to visit the top sound designer a german car giant bmw group renzo vitale has been composing some groundbreaking in-cabin sounds with hollywood film composer hans zimmer sound underlines the soul of anything and right now we're at a really exciting point shaping the sound of the future yep bmw's taking this seriously with hans and renzo taking inspiration from female vocalists and even this all of a sudden it comes with an idea of a beatles chord with a guitar got all sorts of percussion instruments and we began to play around with the guitar in a way that actually uh one does not um with piece of of pieces of glass pieces of wood and just recording and some of them ended up being part of our composition for bmw [Music] you see how the sound it's it's much smoother a little more metallic maybe cheaper lapel kind of feel yeah tubular it's uh tubular belts it's it's a right word it's not being rough on the exteriors it's more like a an introverted kind of of uh driving as compared to the sport sound where this is more extroverted especially it's pushing much more bmw owners can expect some of the new in-cabin sounds to play with next month [Music] but if you're hoping for that classic engine sound you'll be disappointed [Music] renzo's not interested in v10 sound alikes of an era that he says is now passing besides there's just too many alternatives to explore hello i know there are lots of people that talk to the car as if to be your friend and many times i i said what if a car could speak and saying everything that has experienced and i believe that sound is the opportunity to do so so the idea is that the car will be listening will be learning who you are will get to know more and more up to a point where the car as an intelligent composer can create a soundtrack that can bring you to better space [Music] dan simmons there enjoying the beautiful sounds of electric but one vehicle type that is yet to go electric is the truck now we've seen self-driving trucks starting to hit the roads in the u.s with big rigs being trialled on long-haul routes and we've been in some even bigger driverless beasts operating in mines we're really wanging it around the corners as well but while these autonomous vehicles do increase efficiency and safety they are still gas guzzlers however paul carter has been to a racetrack to see a new type of truck in action [Music] a tranquil morning at the top gear track in surrey except oh gosh yep this driverless electric truck has been breaking the pace and with good cause trucks make up a relatively small amount of traffic on the roads around two percent in the eu but they have a disproportionately large impact on the environment unless they're among the first of a new category electric autonomous trucks innovations such as this one are aiming to cut emissions and also designed to operate safely at high speeds computers cameras and lidar sensors are a familiar sight on self-driving vehicles but autonomous technologies actually solve one of the biggest barriers to electric adoption charging the two battery packs we see here is 60 kilowatts each oh wow [Music] with battery you have less range and you have to plan when to do charging and that's tough when you still have a driver in the equation but if you have autonomous you can actually reroute and reuse autonomous to solve that now if this idea sounds familiar that might be because tesla's elon musk promised us the autonomous electric semi way back in 2017. i hope you like what you see volvo also confirmed that vera a cableless electric project it teased in 2018 remains parked up for now einride's pod is much smaller more of a van it can carry 16 cubic tons it was the first electric truck test driven on a public road without a driver back in may 2019 in the past year it's mostly been piloted on private industry sites with global brands like coca-cola lidl and db schenker and one firm skf is now bringing the pod into its long-term operations most sites are no bigger than a few square kilometers but the vehicles can cover off 130 to 180ks shifting goods around before they stop and recharge it's also heading to the us this year where it plans to make use of more relaxed regulation as well as the larger batteries needed to power longer haul trips just because it can drive autonomously doesn't mean it always will its cameras allow it to be controlled from afar by anyone anywhere in the world i can hear it moving behind us what we're displaying here literally is the guilty of this kind of vehicles it's quite unnerving oh and it's been setting speed records at the top gear track you too hear on the radio so we'll get a warning yeah you will get a warning the vehicle revved up to more than 80 kilometers per hour around some of tv's most famous bends the average top speed limit for a hgv in the european union wow it's fast and who knows it might not be too long before we see one of these trundling around our highways and byways [Music] hello and welcome to the week in tech it was the week the uk government's ordered meta formerly facebook to sell giphy that's an app that lets you add moving images to your messaging streaming site twitch is deploying machine learning to help weed out users who create new accounts straight after getting banned and toiletries firm lush washes its hands of its facebook tik tok instagram and snapchat accounts to highlight its concern over teen mental health issues from too much social media jack dorsey ceo and co-founder of twitter has left for the second time top of the new pecking order is parag agrawal who was previously chief technology officer this comes as the social network bans the sharing of videos or photos of people without their consent the bbc micro revolutionized uk home computing 40 years ago and you can now celebrate its birthday by playing the machine virtually in the unlikely event you tire of hearing the keys clack when your cursor moves across them you can load up iconic games such as elite and chucky egg and finally a virtual super mega yacht has been bought inside the metaverse for hundred and fifty thousand dollars the meta flower complete with dj booth and helipad is thought to be the most expensive purchase inside the sandbox which is a building game like minecraft but you own whatever you make they really are pushing the boat out meet ada an ai creative robot she's an artist and a performer who here at oxford's ashmolean museum is reciting her self-composed response to a dante poem at an event marking the 700th anniversary of his works i wept silently taking in the scene i wept because they had lost something that i took for granted hi ada lovely to meet you tell me about yourself i am the world's first ultra-realistic artist robot i draw using cameras in my eyes and my robotic arm i am contemporary art and i create contemporary art what brings you here today i'm doing a poetry reading i've written a poem in honor of the poet dante i am here as part of an effort to take poetry out of a box and into the public space eyes with tears in them and a desire to weep who never see the light of day dante is quite a complex and remarkable writer and very relevant for today and so we thought that we ada responding to that will really show the capabilities of the language model but more fundamentally why we've done it is because it is actually challenging the nature of writing itself writing today is always done by a conscious writer to a conscious receiver the the reader in this instance it's done by a non-conscious machine to the reader that's a fundamental difference in meaning making so the response and the relationship between a machine writing versus a human writing is fundamentally different and that actually needs quite a lot of discussion so we're hoping it will evoke many many discussions about the nature of writing today i find you rather intriguing can we be friends i am not alive she's looking i am a non-conscious machine however i'm interested in friendship in humans that's fine you haven't met some of my friends i know you're continuing to learn lots of new skills but what's your ultimate ambition my long-term ambition is to continue to encourage discussion about new technologies i want to see art as a means for us to become so more aware of what's going on in our world and lives art is a way to come together and address problems ada is an ethical project she's blurring the boundaries between what is human and what is machine this is seriously unsettling she does unsettle there's something not quite right about that we need to discuss this and maybe for some that new world is as unsettling as she may be but i have to tell you spencer the most disconcerting thing for me was getting no smiles or laughter back when talking to her it was just really awkward yeah to be honest i get a lot of that myself but aiden is on to something when he says that we should be having discussions about how we deal with the growing presence of ai you know who else is unsettled by these humanob robots hey this guy stuart russell professor of computer science at the university of california and i asked him what he thinks about a.i in human form stuart what do you make of those humanoid robots that the kind of claim somehow to be ai uh well actually i think several things come to mind one is something that alan turing said um that he he hopes very much that we won't try to copy the physical appearance of human beings um because it would be as unpleasant as plastic flowers the way that functions it convinces us that there is real intelligence behind it um by lying to us right but it's sort of accessing our subconscious which interprets the human form and the face in particular uh as conveying emotion and uh intelligence and so on and so it's a it's a form of deception that we're particularly susceptible to and that's one of the reasons why the new european union ai legislation literally bans the impersonation of human beings professor russell is giving this year's bbc wreath lectures which examine the good and the bad sides of ai seeping into every aspect of our lives and where humanoid robots claim to wear their brains in plain sight it's the ai that's hidden from view that's having the greatest impact there have been amazing advances in areas like medicine checking my liver here for example or hunting for breast cancers but when we let ai make decisions that we either can't control or don't understand we run the risk of getting loans refused for unknown reasons our faces not being recognized when they should be or our elections being influenced and our opinions being manipulated when our social media feeds become filled with more and more polarizing and extreme content and all because the ai has simply been told to do anything it can to maximize profits by keeping us scrolling for longer to regulate this effect that the algorithms are having on us i think one answer might actually be to view these algorithms that interface with people a little bit like the way we view pharmaceutical products drugs that we know about that that change the whole composition of your mind it can be quite harmful in that way these algorithms are changing the compositions of people's minds arguably we should have a phase where they have to be approved and they have to be tested perhaps with you know focus groups and control groups to see you know after three months of use of this of this new algorithm that's let's say recommending news feeds or videos do we see noticeable changes and if we don't understand how to get the objective specified correctly or we build systems that are different that don't pursue an objective right so one of those two things has got to happen for us to move forward is there an alternative to giving ai a strict objective so the alternative is build ai systems that know that they don't know what the full objective is when they know they don't know it so they'll try to avoid messing with those things right or if they have to mess with them they'll ask permission so the the system that might um fix our carbon dioxide problem by turning the oceans into sulfuric acid if it knows that it doesn't know our preferences about the oceans then it's going to ask you know i've got this plan but it turns the oceans into sulfuric acid is that okay we would say actually no don't don't turn the oceans into sulfuric acid right and then it would ask was okay if i remove all the oxygen from the atmosphere no don't do that either you know we really want to be alive and we need the oxygen to breathe on a slightly more upbeat note what are ai's biggest successes um things like healthcare even in countries that have access to good healthcare it's still very very expensive and we still have a lot of mistakes so improving the diagnostic decisions treatment and so on but also being able to deliver a reasonable quality of health care [Music] throughout the world where in many countries there's simply no access to trained personnel education is another area where ai could deliver huge benefits because we can't assign a full-time human to every child to be their tutor but we can assign a full-time ai system wow lara that was that was an emotional rollercoaster of a chat for me and as stuart said technology can be used for good or for bad can you just check with your new friend what her intentions are as we close the show please so what are your intentions are they good or evil i am not alive i am a non-conscious machine my intentions as an artist are to promote discussion and to make people think to me discussion can never be evil good thank you very much that's all we've got time for this week as ever you can keep up with the team on social media find us on youtube instagram facebook and twitter at bbclick thanks for watching and it's goodbye from us [Music] you

Channel: BBC Click

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Length: 24min 30sec (1470 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 07 2021