My wife is a serious car girl and drives her beloved McLaren well enough to be in the top five on amateur days at Sonoma Raceway. She's taught me that different supercars each have their own signature sound and to her it'd be sacrilegious to mess with such iconic perfection. :-)

She's in a club of other supercar owners that puts on a huge charity car show where members bring over $100M of exotics - and none of those cars are nearly as loud as the sonic assault from one of the hopped up $10k rust buckets that occasionally pulls up next to my wife at a stop light and makes our ears bleed revving their engine. They always want to race "the cute girl in the McLaren" but she never takes the bait. When I asked why, she just scoffed that they're all bark and no bite. Plus she has no idea if the driver is race-trained, if their rust-bucket is even safe to be near at high-speeds or if they have insurance. Her favorite line about engine noise is from when she was picking up her car at the McLaren factory in England. While track-testing it with one of the race engineers, he joked "as engineers, we see excess noise as embarrassing because it's wasted horsepower we failed to transfer to the axle."

I find this participant set pointless.

Most kids who were with me in college dreamt of owning muscle cars and Harleys.

Fast forward 25 years: The same set, now in their 40s, get elevated blood pressure at the mere thought of having to share the road with a lifted truck.

I put a slightly louder exhaust on my turbo car because the large torque jump at around 2000 rpm is/was harder to anticipate with the standard exhaust and cabin sound dampening at speed. Now the engine note is a better indicator of the impending torque jump and makes driving smoother and easier without taking my eyes off the road and onto the tachometer.

Sigh. A sample of convenience. Psychology remains the study of undergraduates.

If they wanted real answers, they'd go to bike events.

Actual title: A desire for a loud car with a modified muffler is predicted by being a man and higher scores on psychopathy and sadism

Past: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=ug.edu.pl

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

>Some incidents have led to injuries. In 2021, six bicyclists training for a road race were run over by a 16-year-old who was rolling coal along Business U.S. Highway 290 in Waller County, Texas, outside Houston, when he attempted to drive ahead of the group to engulf them in the exhaust. Two of the cyclists were injured severely enough to require medical evacuation by helicopter. The motorist was not charged at the time of the collision; local cyclists' groups were outraged. [13] He was later charged with six felony counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. [14]

[13] A teenager allegedly hit 6 bicyclists with his truck, sending 3 to the hospital. A biker says the driver was harassing them. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/09/30/texas-teen-...

[14] Waller DA files 6 felonies for 'rolling coal' crash that injured 6 cyclists https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/transpor...

MAGA supporter who coal rolled (black truck smoke) onto protesters outs himself (Parker, Co)

https://www.reddit.com/r/parkerco/comments/1qbdx8a/maga_supp...

Coal rolled at the 'No Kings' protest

https://thewesternnews.com/news/2025/jun/17/coal-rolled-at-t...

The Cruel Practice of Rolling Coal

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-red-light-distri...

Crafty – Machiavellianism

Special – narcissism

Wild – psychopathy

Mean – sadism