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.
This Old Tatra 603 Promo Film Is Gleefully Bonkers
The Maserati Quattroporte May Be The Only Car With This Peculiar Feature And I Can’t Decide If It’s Good Or Bad
This Car Parts Site Is A Dazzling Example Of The Madness Of AI But It’s Kinda Fun
be annoyed if you want, but it was simple solutions to a simple problem.
if one of those buzzers broke, they were $0.25 to replace, and you could do it in your driveway.
if the equivalent thing broke today, it’s a mandatory trip to an automotive repair shop and at least $250 in time just to diagnose, never mind the actual repair.
I’m crazy about originality, and when I got my 85 Celica, the seat belt “chime” wasn’t working, and I actually had it fixed. But at least it was just a series of beeps.
One nice thing about the ‘codeability’ of BMWs – easy to silence the bings and bongs. Seatbelt warning? What’s that? For my Land Rover and Spitfire, the offending buzzers were silenced years ago.
I do have fond memories of the late 80s and 90s VWs that played la cucaracha (or something an awful lot like it) for the door chime. Coincided with the start of Mexican production, LOL.
I had a 68 Olds 442 in the winter of 1978. January’s were bitter and one morning the real (non-wind chill) temp was -27*. I knew the car wouldn’t start, but I threw the key in anyway. I discovered that the obnoxious buzzer could barely scream at that temp! A win for me. BTW, car didn’t start until it reached about 15* above, about 4 days later…
I distinctly remember working under the dash of my 89 Camaro and needing the ignition on for what I was doing which meant getting an up-close earful of the steady “EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE” of that thing’s buzzer. I lasted about 10 minutes before I ripped that thing out and flung it into the ravine across the street. I enjoyed blissful silence for the rest of my days with that car.
My 75 Pontiac Catalina had a front bench seat that actually had a seatbelt sensor for the center which I hado idea about until I was driving a carload of friends bowling and my ball was sitting right there and about 5 minutes in it shifted and set it off. I had no idea what was wrong so I stopped at a gas station where it shifted off the sensor and figured out what was going on.
I don’t quite remember the sound it made, but I do remember the relief washing over me when I realized I could (and did) pull the buzzer from my early 2000’s Ford Focus.
Can we take a moment to focus on the 80s-90s Mercedes-Benz EEEEEEeeeeEEeEeeeEeeeeEE buzzer? I currently own a W140 S-Class and laugh every time I start it. $60k+ in 1996 and that damn buzzer was “The Best Or Nothing”
It’s goofy. My neighbor has a 1997 C140 (the coupe version of your W140) S 500, and theirs has it as well.
They are trying to sell it to me, but I need another 90s European flagship like a hole in the head.
My god’s a holy trinity, which one do I thank? Oh well, I’ll thank them all: thanks mr. Abdul-Jabbar, mrs. Mouton and miss Gordon.
My Datsun 1600 (Datsun 510 for the Americans) ended up with a self-installed ignition buzzer in the form of a rather loud after-market electric fuel pump…needed to properly feed the twin side-draft 45mm Webers I had installed. Turn the key, listen for the “Hummmmm, thunka-thunka-thunka…” , click the key over to fire up the starter-motor and smile blissfully as the sound of the fuel pump was drowned out by the Webers sucking in air (and a very lumpy cam) Happy days!
TIL my beetle should have a buzzer but its not active, thank god
In the early 70s a lot of people would pull their seat belts out most of the way and then block them with a big safety pin to fool the buzzer. Letting the loose belt flop around made much more sense than buckling up.
I miss the turn signals that go sploink!
Do you suppose the people who developed those buzzers felt shame and regret, or were they proud their work wouldn’t go unnoticed?
All the parents rides had them buzzers of yore, but i hafta say gm had some decent ones in the mid to late 80s and refined it for the 90s.
Some of the buzzers for old kw and petes were definitely good at annoying the hell out of you just to crank it up, let alone if your air went low
One of my school buses at primary school was an ancient British Leyland thing, and it had that EXACT sound the Triumph made when the driver switched the key to the ignition point. I think the sound stopped once the glow plugs warmed up.
That Chevelle is just plain painful. But they should be annoying, because they have to get your attention. I’ve had my brain not register a soft chime when I’m distracted as I get to my destination. In one case, because of a massive hailstorm, I was both distracted AND couldn’t hear the soft chime anyway. But I guarantee I would NEVER accidentally leave my keys in that Corvette! Holy crap.
Yup, my first new car was an ’86 Mustang GT. I brought it home and immediately yanked out the door and belt buzzers, defeated the clutch/ignition interlock (with a paperclip if memory serves), pulled the silencer off the air intake and advanced the timing a few degrees. Good times
I was in high school during the first 70’s energy crisis. My dad had a Cadillac that got terrible mileage – he didn’t want it any more and couldn’t sell it so he gave it to me. The car was a piece of crap – everything, and I mean everything, broke on that car at least once, it was rusting like crazy, just a real pile. The only thing that worked reliably was the ignition key buzzer. No matter what, it refused to die. Hearing the buzzer in that Oldsmobile video made my hair stand on end.
I had an ’83 Volvo 240. The buzzer sounded like some sort of nuclear sub core meltdown alarm. Great for scaring passengers!
NO! Buzzers are supposed to be annoying. That’s the entire point.
So I was a ten-year old know-it-all when these buzzers came out, and I quickly learned how to disable them (and get a tip ) from my dad’s friends. This gave me the mistaken confidence that I actually knew how to work on cars. It took about 30 years to sort this out.
Rolls Royce has nice sounds including some sort of harp (Royal Orchestra no less), and you can get it in any BMW apparently, using the decoder
There was a time, between iDrive 4 an iDrive 6, when you could reliably switch between the different brand chime suites in the BMW Group. These were BMW, BMW i (as in i3 and i8), Rolls-Royce, MINI and Supra (which was actually the classic BMW gong chime after BMW retired it).
However, since iDrive 7, some models no longer include a provision to do this. My 2022 X5 did not.
I always liked the friendly and polite robot in the Mid-80s Chrysler New Yorker. I much prefer a Speak & Spell to tell me my door is open, over a buzzer any day!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aW9nmuTqIE0
A door is a jar!
Having lived in that time – It was horribly aurally.
Turn on “McMillan and Wife” reruns on Prime – The first season has an episode which portrays Mac and Sally getting into his 1972 Lincoln Continental – and you can hear the ever-present Key in Ignition/Seatbelt buzzer.
My Mom’s 1972 Mercury Monterey had that same buzzer. It never went off until you buckled up or turned the car off.
Dad needs to unbuckle for a moment to get his wallet from his back pocket?
BUZZZZZ!!!!!
Mom needs to unbuckle to remove her sweater?
BUZZZZZ!!!!
I think it was ’73 or ’74 when cars had a timer on the seatbelt buzzer.
‘74 was the year of the infamous seatbelt interlock. The “4 to 8 seconds after startup” standard that we still use today started in ‘75 as a result of the backlash to the interlocks.