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."
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.
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.
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.
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
Sigh. A sample of convenience. Psychology remains the study of undergraduates.
If they wanted real answers, they'd go to bike events.
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.
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
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.
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...
These with stupidly loud bikes? Sure.
> Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
Crafty – Machiavellianism
Special – narcissism
Wild – psychopathy
Mean – sadism
at no point does the study mention mid-life or anyone outside of the college cohort.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
They‘d meet a bunch of 1) people actively being assholes and/or 2) people with a lack of basic empathy.
Then I sat in LA traffic all day long in early September in 100+ heat, and I looked over and saw some old bitty in a very nice Bentley. Not a drop of sweat on her, couldn't hear a horn honking if she tried, music was probably perfect quality, seat was probably massaging her the whole ride home.
That's when I finally got it. It's not the engine that mattered to her.
People into ultra-luxury car brands have a saying something like "The person who pulls up to a five star hotel in a Rolls Royce has a huge suite but the person who pulls up in a Bentley owns the hotel." :-)
Through the supercar club my wife belongs to we've now met dozens of supercar owners and from that sample I'd say it's roughly a Pareto split. For about 20% the status signaling and attention is the major feature while the other ~80% own the car for the driving performance and enjoy the look aesthetically but would prefer if it looked like a minivan to everyone else. There's also a practical consideration because a few people drive like idiots around supercars. I've been with my wife on the highway and had cars race up and start weaving dangerously in the lane next to us because the driver was shooting video of our car.
The ~20% focused on status do sort of cluster around a type. The signaling extends to clothes, jewelry, etc being overtly blingy. As a group they're more likely to do things like peel out at stop lights and drive faster than the flow of traffic. The car they own also tends to be at the bottom of the supercar range, something like a Huracan, which is technically a Lamborghini but internally based on an Audi R8. It's a nice car but my wife says (privately to me)... "Dude, just get the Audi version. Same car. Less money and the service is better."
In general, my sense is the majority of the club are passionate car enthusiasts who feel the 'status' guys (it's always guys) give supercar owners a bad rep and just roll their eyes at the attention-seeking behavior. One time when a car meet was ending, we were talking with a knowledgeable older gentleman from England. We discovered he'd been a super-licensed race driver in F3 a couple decades ago and as he was explaining the finer points of wheel-loading in low-speed corners to my wife, one of 'those guys' in a Huracan loudly peeled out of the parking lot. As the smoke was clearing, the gentleman glanced over and sniffed "The machine was engineered to accelerate without losing traction but one does need to possess a modicum of skill." :-)
For the other ~80%, the primary motivation varies but it's not status (though that can be a secondary contributor for some). I'd estimate roughly half are car enthusiasts, split between those focused on driving performance and collectors who tend to own several supercars, sometimes rare limited editions. For those folks, projecting status can't be primary because at the race track everyone has a very expensive car and collectors can only drive one supercar at a time - so why bother with the hassle of garaging a collection no one ever sees?
I'm not sure exactly how to describe the other half but they aren't mainly car enthusiasts. I'd describe it more as being quality enthusiasts who appreciate having things which they personally feel are of uniquely high quality. Those things are usually expensive but they don't trust price as a reliable indication of 'unique quality' and they don't bother 'projecting' anything to others because they don't seem to care what others think.
For them It's about specific traits they find uniquely valuable - and it's not always things other people recognize as valuable. One McLaren owner give me a detailed exposition on how its unique one-piece carbon fiber monocoque delivers best-in-class torsional rigidity enabling incredibly precise tracking on low-speed corners. He said he enjoys it immensely as "an engineering object" yet he's never driven it over 85 mph and wouldn't know how to change the oil. Then he educated me about how his shirt was also an example of unusual quality, performance micro-materials and clever design. I asked him where I could get one and learned it's $20 at Costco. So, pretty clearly not focused on status projection. A lot of these folks are kind of 'stealth supercar owners'. A couple years after my wife got her McLaren, her sister visited from out of state and was shocked to be picked up in a McLaren at the airport. My wife had never mentioned it because she said her sister "isn't a car person." But the ~20% apparently manage to do more than enough signaling for the rest of us. I'm sure everyone they've ever met knows what car they have. :-)
Now is it smart to do all of that just to drive 35mph in traffic? That’s another discussion :)
For me my car isn't loud right now, but I do just genuinely enjoy the thrill and sound of the car in "track" setup. It's too loud to drive on the street but it's a thrill on track. The loudness isn't the point and I wish it were quieter, but the different exhaust components give it the raw visceral sound that I love.
I guess you can think of it like the difference between music on the TV or music at a concert, the sound is literally different not just louder, and the context makes everything more visceral.
I do know sometimes when someone pulls up nearby with loud music coming out of their rolled-down windows... I wonder what putting on loud disney princess music would do?
The hostility comes from the perception that someone wants to take away your toy. Again, it's very very basic, the same thing you see if you try to take away an item from an animal that is engaged in a dopamine response with that item. Like a dog eating something. They will bite you or at least growl if you take it away.
Sure, but now replace “toy” with, “peaceful Neighbourhood”
The only reason anyone wants to take someone’s dumb truck away is because they made the the first move, destroying or significantly degrading something that other people enjoyed.
Real basic and, fairly universal. You may prefer a quieter car, but there is also a sound level that is below your preference.
Dogs that tend to bite when denied their pleasures tend not to be welcome in prosocial human societies. One wishes drivers were more often held to the same standard.
I would be thrilled with a silent car if it was safe and legal.
One is a presentation and the other is noise pollution negatively impacting everyone else and the environment.
This is just culture war for HN commenters. Everyone should grow up a little more.