Horny

The earlier tone of the horn has changed from its sound of yester-year, when initially the raucous klaxon advised all with its strident “aah-ooo-gah”, through to later times with cars later morphing to a “baarp”, yeerp, or blurk”, all in a range of different tones.

But now, just like their chassis styles and general appearance, modern cars all seem to have the same identical high-toned horn’s call of “beep”.

These alto squeaks from affronted machines, although not particularly quiet, are nevertheless difficult to assign to any particular vehicle in the surrounding mob, meaning it could be anyone warning of anything.

Nowadays the time has passed when you could generally identify a specific car by associating its horn sound with its appearance. Not even size comes into play, with smaller cars having little, quieter horns, and large cars bigger noisier ones. It is hard to put the aural blame onto any easily identifiable source.

To a certain extent you still can – if it’s a truck. With a heavy, more rugged nature it’s not hard to associate the bellowing low-pitched blaaah” air horn with the alerting yell of that monstrous B-double behind you wanting you to get out of his lane.

Today’s vehicles are exemplars of mass production conformity, having lost much of their design individuality yet with a plethora of ancillary cosmetic trimmings and selling proposition revolving around price and fuel consumption.

There is much emphasis on styling, as well as on the intended purpose of that car, but seemingly gone are the days when the overall appearance and build of an automobile assigned to it some kind of character which made it attractive to the lifestyle preference of a potential purchaser.

But otherwise, in a similar manner to their body appearances, today’s cars all sound the same as these little creatures scuttle past you after a pleading “meep”, or if there is an element of road rage being released on an offender, a ”meep-meep-meep”.

I enjoy watching the reaction of other drivers on those occasions when I use my motor scooter instead of my small van, and blow the horn as a legit warning call. The ensuing high-pitched “yeep yeep” makes them wonder whether they should take seriously those two small wheels. But then, they’d probably be astounded if I had a powerful horn like a pounding semi-trailer. 

I guess it’s horses for courses, except that in the case of today’s cars, they all wear the same colours, run down the track in the same lane, but neigh at the same pitch.

Not really all that horny.