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I'm not a car guy, so I used to think such ear-damaging decibels were necessary for performance but have since learned it's not required even for ultra-high performance road cars that can go >200 mph. While a 12 cylinder Lamborghini Aventador is louder than a Hyundai, when both are idling at a stop light, it's actually barely louder from 100 feet away. And yet people with real supercars almost never modify them to be louder than stock.
My wife is a serious car girl and drives her beloved McLaren well enough to be in the top five on amateur days at Sonoma Raceway. She's taught me that different supercars each have their own signature sound and to her it'd be sacrilegious to mess with such iconic perfection. :-)
She's in a club of other supercar owners that puts on a huge charity car show where members bring over $100M of exotics - and none of those cars are nearly as loud as the sonic assault from one of the hopped up $10k rust buckets that occasionally pulls up next to my wife at a stop light and makes our ears bleed revving their engine. They always want to race "the cute girl in the McLaren" but she never takes the bait. When I asked why, she just scoffed that they're all bark and no bite. Plus she has no idea if the driver is race-trained, if their rust-bucket is even safe to be near at high-speeds or if they have insurance. Her favorite line about engine noise is from when she was picking up her car at the McLaren factory in England. While track-testing it with one of the race engineers, he joked "as engineers, we see excess noise as embarrassing because it's wasted horsepower we failed to transfer to the axle."
The only thing I can really think of is a turbo Anti Lag System that you can get in top-end consumer cars like Mercedes AMGs. It’s that popping you hear when coming off the throttle, you’ll also hear it in rally cars. The funny thing is, the same popping can happen with any car if the timing is off so you sometimes get kids driving around with misfiring engines cause it “sounds cool” even though their car might not even have a turbo fan! It’s one of those things that if they were actually passionate about these machines they’d know they look like idiots, but they’re not so they do.
The popping sounds from a turbo car is from the wastegate (whistling sound for a blow off value) when the system is releasing pressure from the turbo that was built up. It prevents over compression that would damage the engine.
> And yet people with real supercars almost never modify them to be louder than stock.
people with real supercars don't have anything to prove, nor any reason to want more attention.
if anything, they want less attention. esp. from the random pleb on the road. the existence of the car itself is enough.
and that's before the muscle car sound purist that the parent poster alludes to.
This is a weird take. Has anyone here been to Miami or LA?
I’ve known a lot of people with supercars. Quite a few want the attention. If they didn’t - they would drive a different car. Very few are getting them for performance reasons. If they just wanted a performance car then they’d probably just get an open wheel.
There is a medical treatise, "On Assholes", just waiting to be written here, in much the same way that Harry G. Frankfurt introduced us to the technical academic concept of 'bullshit' in his book "On Bullshit".
Not medical, but there is a book: https://www.onassholes.com/
While looking for that in the local libraries I saw there's an update? variant? "Assholes: A theory of Donald Trump". Looks to be mostly the same book, just with Trump's face added to the cover. There's also quite a lot of other books about dealing with assholes. "I knew it! I'm surrounded by (books about) assholes!".
Participants were 529 undergraduate business students with a mean age of 18.14 years
I find this participant set pointless.
Most kids who were with me in college dreamt of owning muscle cars and Harleys.
Fast forward 25 years: The same set, now in their 40s, get elevated blood pressure at the mere thought of having to share the road with a lifted truck.
At 20, while in the Marine Corps, I absolutely had to have a lifted orange Jeep.
decades later, it is cringe, and after a friend of a friend was killed by an idiot in a RAM truck, I'm 100% in favor of banning the "yank tank" style trucks
youts gonna yout
Participants were 529 (289 men, 234 women, and 6 identified as other) undergraduate business students with a mean age of 18.14 years (SD = 1.19, range 16 to 37).
Sigh. A sample of convenience. Psychology remains the study of undergraduates.
If they wanted real answers, they'd go to bike events.
As a biker, there is sure a lot of peer pressure to have a louder bike. My s1k has the factory msport straight through akro muffler and a valve system that opens the larger exit, also bypassing the baffles in the 'lunchbox' underneath, at 7k. Meaning it's very quiet until it's being asked to go very fast.
Replacing the cats and lunchbox with headers gives under 1hp on a 220hp bike.
But, every meetup, multiple people are asking "when are you getting a proper exhaust system". Which is basically louder for no other reason but being loud.
Thank you. As a biker I really dislike bikes made lout just to be made loud.
No, it doesn't save lives, most serious accidents are being t-boned on the junction, the car failing to yield to the biker with priority, biker losing control over the machine, or biker being reckless.
Most of it (at least in the UK) is attributed to ineffective observation, which in case of the bikers means education (training) and better visibility (special lights, bright coloured jacket and helmet).
Not a deafening ride.
> As a biker, there is sure a lot of peer pressure to have a louder bike.
I'm amused by vehicles which are very noisy when barely doing anything. Really, almost all cars today have more acceleration than can be used outside racing. Most SUVs and pickup trucks today have better 0-60 times than 1960s muscle cars.
In normal operation today, the power train is not working very hard. Many pickup trucks now have fake engine noise in the cabin generated by the audio system. Not just electrics; gas engine vehicles too. Ford has been doing this since 2015, and most customers do not know it.
South Park did a pretty great episode on this topic. IIRC, they had Emmanuel Lewis “officially” change the definition of a word in Websters’ Dictionary!
I’m a classic car owner, I get the same thing from some people in that scene. I have kept my car exhaust at stock specs and it’s just the right level of loud for what the car is. IMO the cars should be as loud as how powerful they are. You can’t have a 455+ ci engine and expect it to be quiet, and the smaller the exhaust the harder it is for the engine to breathe. It’s a balance that has to be done right.
I guess this explains why in Japan very few of the motorcycles are loud. It's something I was surprised by when moving here from the US. It seems like in the US most (or perhaps many more) riders are being deliberately antisocial?
I’ve noticed in my own car’s forums that over about ten years, most of the loud-seekers moved on to other cars while the remainder of us have much more diversity of gender and ‘loudness’ interests. Our sample size of self-nominated participants is also a couple thousand, not at all restricted to undergrads, and anecdotally parallels the study: those who seek loudness uniformly present as men, and in large majority tend to treat prosocial-community responses with disregard, hostility, or mockery. So, this study tracks :) but that doesn’t excuse the sampling bias of business-degrees (a field of graduates which includes corporate executives and daytraders, neither particularly well known for their social concerns), nor the self-selecting and anecdotal nature of my own separate experience. Perhaps we’ll see a wider study someday.
> those who seek loudness uniformly present as men, and in large majority tend to treat prosocial-community responses with disregard, hostility, or mockery.
Is the loudness then just a big "fuck you" to the rest of the world or does it provide the loudness seeker with something besides the joy of knowing that they're pissing off everyone within earshot? If they were the last living person on Earth would they still go to the trouble to modify their vehicle for loudness?
Happened for my car community too, anecdotal of course.
Two aspects I think, the clout chasers move on, and the remaining cohort are older with a bit more empathy for community and also better things to do than provoke the cops. No speaking for everyone with that last bit, there are still those that thrive on the chaos.
There's also tech to solve for having your cake and eating it too. Get a valve, loud for track days, quiet for the commute.
> If they wanted real answers, they'd go to bike events.
They‘d meet a bunch of 1) people actively being assholes and/or 2) people with a lack of basic empathy.
Self-reported data via an internet survey. Garbage science means garbage data. I wouldn't put any faith in these results. You can't swing a dead cat in a room full of business students without hitting a bunch of sadistic psychopaths anyway.
Those questions don't allow for the possibility of installing louder exhausts for non-psychoanalyzable reasons... There are also degrees of loudness.
I put a slightly louder exhaust on my turbo car because the large torque jump at around 2000 rpm is/was harder to anticipate with the standard exhaust and cabin sound dampening at speed. Now the engine note is a better indicator of the impending torque jump and makes driving smoother and easier without taking my eyes off the road and onto the tachometer.
Have a look at every owner of excessively loud pickem up trucks and motorcycles too.
I would like to find a lighter exhaust system for my motorcycle, the stock system weighs like 30 pounds. All the aftermarket exhausts seem to be louder then stock. I want something that light and quiet but everyone else seems to want loud AF.
Add a muffler. Universal ones exist and a shop can fabricate the exhaust headers/tubing to make it work.
South Park did it.
My friends and I always assumed it correlates with a small penis.
It is true for gun ownership, so I guess it is true for noise.
Oh how conveniently this would fit into your worldview ;)
If you had read the actual study, you would have noticed this paragraph:
the odds of owning a gun (any gun or a military-style rifle) are lower for men who are more dissatisfied with the size of their penises. In fact, each one-unit increase in penis size dissatisfaction reduces the odds of owning any gun by 11% (OR = 0.89, p < .05) and the odds of owning a military-style rifle by 20% (OR = .80, p < .01). According to Model 2 of Table 5, each one-unit increase in penis size dissatisfaction also reduces the expected count of total guns owned by 11% (IRR = 0.89, p < .01). Across outcomes, we failed to observe any associations between penis enlargement and gun ownership.
This probably won't surprise you, but most of the time, the only variable psychologists measure during initial patient assessment is penis size, because it explains nearly every male behavior there is.
now this ^ is the high quality HN discussion that we come here for
Sadistic psychopathic MAGA assholes love rolling coal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal
>Some incidents have led to injuries. In 2021, six bicyclists training for a road race were run over by a 16-year-old who was rolling coal along Business U.S. Highway 290 in Waller County, Texas, outside Houston, when he attempted to drive ahead of the group to engulf them in the exhaust. Two of the cyclists were injured severely enough to require medical evacuation by helicopter. The motorist was not charged at the time of the collision; local cyclists' groups were outraged. [13] He was later charged with six felony counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. [14]
[13] A teenager allegedly hit 6 bicyclists with his truck, sending 3 to the hospital. A biker says the driver was harassing them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/09/30/texas-teen-...
[14] Waller DA files 6 felonies for 'rolling coal' crash that injured 6 cyclists https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/transpor...
MAGA supporter who coal rolled (black truck smoke) onto protesters outs himself (Parker, Co)
https://www.reddit.com/r/parkerco/comments/1qbdx8a/maga_supp...
Coal rolled at the 'No Kings' protest
https://thewesternnews.com/news/2025/jun/17/coal-rolled-at-t...
The Cruel Practice of Rolling Coal
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-red-light-distri...
2023
Actual title: A desire for a loud car with a modified muffler is predicted by being a man and higher scores on psychopathy and sadism
Can we put motorcycle owners in the same bracket?
All of them? LOL.
These with stupidly loud bikes? Sure.
Correlation doesn't imply causation
https://xkcd.com/552/
> Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
fascinating:
Crafty – Machiavellianism
Special – narcissism
Wild – psychopathy
Mean – sadism
I don't like the association of the word crafty with Machiavelli. "Crafty" is basically synonymous with hacker. You can be crafty without being a dick.
Also mid life crisis.
the study was on business undergrads, which means likely 18-24
at no point does the study mention mid-life or anyone outside of the college cohort.
> undergraduate business students with a mean age of 18.14 years (SD = 1.19, range 16 to 37).
I don’t like loud exhausts but I’m also not threatened by masculinity.
I wonder if this correlates with people who blow whistles or play loud musical instruments at protests.
I don't think the average owner of a loud vehicle is trying to disorient others in hopes of getting them to make a mistake like mag dumping on someone trying to drive away.
Looks like this guy never seen rainbow bluetooth speakers at tourist spots.
Manliness is the confounding factor.