To say that the streets in India are congested is an understatement. If you’re used to driving in Europe or the U.S., basically you’d need to prepare to enter a completely different world, like in Running Man but with 10,000 other contestants.
German automaker Audi equips its cars for the Indian market with suped up horns, specially for the Indian driver, who apparently honks like crazy in order to get anywhere on the famously packed streets. The amount of honking you do in Mumbai in a day amounts to about a year of honking in Germany. Audi even says that car horns in India need to be in a whole other category by themselves. They created a special team just to develop this superhorn, with different endurance tests and such.
Presumably they set up a special room to house the horn that they kept honking continuously for 2 weeks. Imagine being chosen to be the one to have to check on that (“Go check if it’s still going. Yeah? Check again.”) Some traffic safety folks have protested the horn, saying it worsens the growing hearing loss problem due to sound pollution.
More about driving in India: many Audi owners use chauffeurs to do their driving, so Audi customized the interiors to make it easier to give instructions from the back seat. And in India, honking doesn’t correlate with anger or aggression – it’s a normal way of broadcasting your intentions … among 10,000 other drivers doing the same(?)
Comments from netizen in Japan:
“Talk about a different culture. Whoa.”
“They’re seriously honking nonstop. lol”
“I didn’t know horns could break.”
“Maybe they should make it automatic, like just honk whenever you use the brake.”