The Car Horn That Says Sorry

A car horn has exactly one thing to say, and it says it very loudly. It cannot tell the difference between a lorry reversing into your bonnet and a friend you have just spotted outside the bakery. Somewhere along the way a hobbyist decided that was an unfair amount of pressure to put on a single button, and set about giving the horn a second voice.

The first prototype was not subtle. He bolted a large brass horn to the dashboard, pointed it at the windscreen in the hope that the sound would bounce politely outwards, and wired it to a small second button beside the steering wheel. Testing in the driveway established two things very quickly. Brass is extremely loud inside a small car, and leaning over the wheel with your shoulders around your ears is not a recognised driving position. The brass horn now lives in the garage, where it is used to call people in for dinner.

The finished apology horn sounds nothing like the original: a short, soft, faintly embarrassed two-note chirp, roughly the noise a doorbell would make if it had been caught eavesdropping. Press it after a clumsy lane change, or after honking at someone who had done nothing wrong at all, and the car finally says the thing your hand is already trying to mime through the windscreen.

It is, of course, completely useless. Nobody else knows the sound. To the driver behind you a polite chirp is simply a small honk, and in traffic a small honk is the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one. The invention only works in a world where everybody has one, which is the fate of most good manners and very nearly all good gadgets. Two of his neighbours have already asked him, kindly, why his car keeps sneezing.

The real thing behind the joke is how little a car lets you say. Inside it you are sealed behind glass, a few metres from other people, with almost no way of reaching them. Drivers make up for it with a small private sign language: a raised hand for thank you, a flash of the lights, a shrug through the windscreen, an apologetic wince in the mirror. Much of it is guesswork, and a lot of it is missed entirely. The horn is the only part of the car built to speak to anyone, and it only knows one word.

Still, there is something in it. Cars are wonderfully fluent in impatience and have almost no vocabulary for regret. Give a machine one small way of being sorry and you start noticing how rarely the rest of them are. The hobbyist still drives with both buttons fitted. He mostly uses the second one, he says, on himself.