So this morning for Cold Start I wrote about this old Volkswagen salesperson’s guide, and noted in that guide the ignition warning buzzer was mentioned multiple times as being “annoying.” Significantly, the writers of that 55-year-old guide were not wrong. At all. But it wasn’t just Volkswagen; pretty much every buzzer – ignition, seat belt, you left your lights on – installed in cars before, oh, 1990, was a grating auditory nightmare.
Today, modern cars have a wide variety of chimes and dings and beeps, and while some modern cars tend to go a little overboard with the beeping (ahem, Prius Prime) they’re generally all vastly better than how things used to be back in the Age of Awful Buzzers.
Don’t believe me? Listen to this shit – first, here’s the specific VW one that started me thinking about all this:
Oh man, that brings back some memories; painful memories of being aurally assaulted with that late-Victorian electric chair sound, and the slightly better memory of pulling that little silver noise-cube out of its socket, forever.
But all of these little mechanical buzzers were pretty awful: here’s one from a Chevy Nova:
Awful, just awful. And these weren’t improved even when slightly muffled behind layers of rattly dashboard plastics; if anything, the resonance of all those haphazardly-screwed-together dash bits just made it all worse.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a great example, in a video titled “The World’s Most Annoying Key Buzzer: 1970 Cutlass Supreme”:
Oh jeezis, that’s fucking miserable. These awful sounds trigger all sorts of childhood trauma memories of growing up in a world where every motherclutching car I clambered into as a child spent the first 30 seconds or more of its precious life after starting bleating out horrific sounds like these.
Here, listen to this Chevelle one:
What kinds of sounds were they subjecting themselves to across the pond, you may be wondering? Well I hope the plaintive wail of this Triumph Spitfire answers your question!
What baffles me about this one featuring a ’77 Camaro buzzer is that it seems whoever made this wanted to get it working again, and somehow gives a thumbs up to that hideous noise? The fuck is wrong with you, dude?
It’s like this guy with his Firebird, going through all this effort so he can, what, listen to this?
I just think we should all take a little moment and say some sort of automotive prayer of gratitude to whatever automotive higher powers you believe in that these loathsome and grating pain-wailers are no longer a thing. Since the 2000s, automakers have embraced chimes, which aren’t exactly not annoying. Here’s a sampling of Ford F-150 ignition chimes from the past decade or so as a reminder:
Not exactly Billboard Hot 100 material, but they’re so so so very much better than what came before. The difference in annoyance level is like accidentally sitting on a moist hand-wipe versus accidentally sitting in a puddle of stale urine. You don’t really want to do either, but there’s one that you want to do vastly less.
Gratitude is a good thing. I’m letting those gracious feelings wash over me as I revel in knowing that putting a key into a car ignition (well, even that act is now quite uncommon) isn’t rewarded with the sounds of the screams of a rare male banshee getting its scrotum pinched in a clothes dryer door and broadcast at amplified volume through an air-raid siren speaker.
Life isn’t perfect, but in some small ways, it’s getting better.
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eh, 2020 Jetta frost warning beep still makes my heart double-clutch whenever it goes off (this is the fifth winter together). 39 Fahrenheit shouldn’t sound like you’re about to t-bone an asteroid on the Kessel run.
The modern Ford chimes along with the “bip-bip” turn signal sound were novel when new, but I don’t think I could bear one now. It does seem to have achieved notoriety with a number of memes about it. I guess it’s all relative though, I watched a VW GLI road test from 1986 the other day where the VW 3-note buzzer was specifically complained about, and that was an age where the awful buzzers were still out there.
In the 2000s Toyota started moving away from the nice chime they had used forever, to a generic beeper sound which felt like such a step backwards.
Aggghhh. That beep-beep-beep is terrible.
Call me an oddball, but I liked the tri-tone chime in my Mk2 Jetta that I moved the relay from car to car until I parted out my last Mk2, and only because it was off battery so long when they hauled it away I forgot.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wPWtJC29TYQ
Oh, that happy chime brings back memories…
I can’t remember now whether a particular sound my Jetta made was from leaving the key in the ignition or a seatbelt reminder, but it cracked me up watching Top Gear and the same sound was emitted by a Bugatti Veyron when they were engaging launch control.
Having had a Ford truck from most all of those generations, that Ford chime video brought back memories. Hearing the dings, I could almost smell each truck!
For just a few cents more, these things could have had bells like telephone ringers of yore, which I think would have been preferrable. Alas, bean-counters had their way.
I think it was certain 90’s Hondas that had the most pleasant bell-like “Ding Ding Ding” sound.
Or…
https://youtu.be/pZ301QEoo9Y?si=FvYsaVeL5W4l0HcK
I was waiting for someone to share that video.
“The door is ajar. The door is ajar. The door is ajar.”
“No, the door is not a jar! It’s a door!”
Don’t forget your keys! Thank you!
Ooh, I love this. I am what you would call a Avowed Car-Chime Nerd.
Interestingly, even Mercedes-Benz’ used buzzers into the 80s. But it was the premium American cars that had nice chimes (Cadillac was using what sounded like a door bell in the 70s). I think that’s because it was the US that legislated seatbelt chimes, so American automakers saw them as part of a car’s presentation. Meanwhile, Asian and especially European automakers saw them as more of a function to literally alert a driver that their key was left in the ignition or that they’d left their seatbelt off…an so they had more functional buzzers. They weren’t supposed to sound pretty.
Eventually, like everything else in modern cars, the industry began to see chimes as a way to imbue a product or brand with personality, and so the chimes got a lot nicer. The Japanese and Chrysler had an era where some cars had spoken warnings, facilitated by a miniature record player.
These days, most cars play the chimes digitally, through either a speaker somewhere or, increasingly more-often, the built-in sound system/radio. The turn signal/hazard sounds are often played through that same audio channel.
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I’ve had two cars I purchased with broken chimes/turn-signal sounds, and it bothered me enough to fix them. My 1996 Jaguar XJ12 had an inoperable speaker in the steering column when I bought it, so no chimes and no turn signal noises. I ordered a replacement from eBay UK, which actually came with a complete harness that also included the wiper and turn signal stalks, and I had to disassemble the steering column all the way past the clock spring to replace that. Here it is after the replacement. I had to also fix the chime/turn signal in my 2004 Volkswagen Phaeton V8. This involved removing the cluster and taking the back panel off of said cluster, where a chime speaker was readily accessible. A replacement on eBay was just $12, and was compatible with various VW Group (VW, Audi, Bentley, Lamborghini, Porsche, Bugatti) vehicles from that era.
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One other thing I want to nerd out about is modern FoMoCo vehicles. Most of the ones that were introduced with MyFord/MyLincoln Touch available are the ones that have the “pretty chimes.” So, as some examples, the 2013+ Fusion and MKZ, 2015+ F-150, 2015+ Mustang, 2016+ MKX, etc. These chimes are, allegedly, generated by a polyphonic speaker that’s integrated with the factory audio system. Ford and Lincoln have separate chimes.
However, on these FoMoCo vehicles, if the vehicle calls for a chime alert and the radio doesn’t respond in time or can’t be powered up, you’ll get an uglier chime that comes from the cluster. This commonly happens if, for example, the vehicle has been sitting a while and the battery state is precarious. My 2021 F-150 Limited would do this from time to time. And, even after the car was started, if it played the ugly cluster chimes once, it would only continue to use those chimes–even for parking sensor and adaptive-cruise/BlueCruise alerts, until the ignition was cycled again.
I’ve never seen any other automaker have a fallback with an alt chime, but I’ve had vehicles with radio-generated chimes that sometimes glitched and didn’t always play them–nanely, a 2022 BMW X5 and a 2022 Volvo XC90–so maybe this fallback is a necessary evil.
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Some of my favorite chimes:
Some of my least-favorite chimes:
My 99 Tahoe uses a chime module, just a box that plugs into the fuse panel like a lot of GM cars of the 90s, problem was it was a very shrill annoying buzzing sound, I replaced it with one from a Buick Century I got in a junkyard, it’s soooo much more pleasant now. Until I found one, I left it unplugged.
Yeah I’m looking for a bong-bong for my 95 K2500, can’t stand the flatlining heartbeat the original chime has. Until I find one, the chime module lives in my glovebox.
GM chimes on model lines that weren’t that single-note tone (tended to be trucks more I think) seemed to go backwards in the 90s from a ding-ding to a BONG-BONG. C/D described it in a Chevy Venture as sounding like it was held under the dash against its will.
Sorry, but something about the Ford tri-bong is so much worse for me than most of those other buzzers.
They were trying to mimic fancy chimes like BMW.
But they were much easier to eliminate.
Grateful for better chimes,yes, but did you just call a sweet GT6 a Spitfire!?
Our old VW bus sounded like someone was (unsuccessfully) playing a game of Operation. My younger brother used to shout “wrenched ankle” whenever the buzzer went off.
That’s hilarious! I remember that game.
My mother was stone deaf in her later years, so she had a friend’s husband wire-up a flashing light on top of the instrument cluster to remind her to fasten her seatbelt, take her keys out of the ignition, etc.
There must be a parallel universe where all the modern safety systems are built using 70’s-80’s era technology for the user interface. So, for the lane departure warning you could have the Volvo 240 seat belt warning relay(?) or the aforementioned wounded banshee screams, instead of the relatively mild computer generated bings and bongs. Sonar parking sensors! Or ”I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.. you have reached the speed limit.”
When I reupholstered the seats in my ’95 Miata, I “accidentally” forgot to hook the seatbelt buzzers back up. Best mod ever!
That was the first thing I learned on Miata.Net – how to disable the buzzer.
As someone who has driven many a government pool vehicle over the years…
The Ford chime will forever haunt my memories.
Can confirm the Oldsmobile one. My 1968 has that identical buzzer and the worst part is the inconsistency. It sounds like it has emphysema, just wheezing away, struggling to keep buzzing at me as loud as possible, but you can almost here it sign with relief when the door shuts.
First time I got in the car I really thought something was wrong until I realized it was supposed to do that. It super triggers my kids’ sensory issues.
Honestly, there’s a part of me that wishes I had something as jarring as these – twice now, I have been told to leave the keys in my car when I dropped it off for service, only for muscle memory to take over and have me lock the car (yes, a manual lock in 2025) with the keys inside.
I don’t think I’ve ever even heard the soft door-ajar chime in any other context – said muscle memory, coupled with the fact Sparky has no trunk release and thus requires a key to open the trunk, means I always take my keys with me before I open the door.
Therefore, for the sake of this one niche scenario, I need a buzzer that screams: “You idiot, your keys are in there!” The more annoying, the better.
The ones in BMW E36’s were made from leftover U-Boat dive alarms
I daily a e36 and the buzzer is horrendous. It made me literally laugh out loud when I first bought the car.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sPIvbJKp9A
Is it that sound starting at 7 seconds in this video? Holy hell that’s terrifying. I know urgency is the whole point of these sounds, but this sounds more like someone hit the wrong button in one of James Bond’s cars.
That Nova buzzer with the solenoid coil and sparks is an epic piece of engineering.
My first car was a ’74 beetle, and I’m now trying to think of the noises that bugged me most. I don’t even remember that key buzz… maybe that relay died before I had the car. However, my father got some wider rims/tires to put on it, and if anybody sat in the back seat, the rear tires would rub on the fenders at any bump- that was a terrible noise.
Lincolns have gone from buzzers in the 70s to chimes played by the Detroit Symphony today. It’s actually soothing.
Non-zero chance he took it to one of those depressing single-model car shows and some boomer judge docked him .2 points on the judging sheet because the buzzer wasn’t working.
Me: *is mildly interested in going to car shows now*
Near me: *purportedly the largest Corvette car show in the country*