I Cringe In Pain When Ever I Hear These Sounds

8 Horrific Noises No Petrolhead Wants To Hear

Every petrolhead has built up a relationship with their car and will know it inside out. Sometimes you'll be driving along and a new, unwelcome noise will hit your eardrums. Here are the worst things a petrolhead could hear!

2. The sound of alloy meeting kerb

In my time as a motoring journalist, I’ve only ever kerbed the alloys on two cars. The first victim was one of the gorgeous 19-inch wheels on a Peugeot RCZ R that clipped the pavement as I negotiated (badly) the narrow car-lined street outside my mum’s house. The sound made me feel physically sick. The second was pretty much every inch of all four 21-inch Turbine alloys on a Tesla Model S I drove to France.

We were supposed to be put on a Eurotunnel train with the truckers on account of the Tesla being very wide and the alloys being very big and very, very expensive. Too late to do anything about it, we discovered the numpties who processed our ticket ignored their instructions and put us on a carriage with, no joke, about an inch of clearance on each side. We drove very slowly through the train, upsetting half the tourists coming back from France, and yet we still inflicted a lot of scrapes. The whole time, my heart was dropping deeper and deeper into my chest as a feeling of misery washed over me.

5. Unfamiliar sounds from the engine

When you drive as much as us petrolheads do, it’s quite easy to become totally tuned in to the sound your engine makes when it’s happy. You might not even consciously know it, but the second an unfamiliar knock rears its head, you’re on it. Time to start diagnosing the issue before finding out just how much it’s going to cost to fix.

7. Scraping your slammed ride on a speed bump

If you’ve dropped your car, or even just drive something super sporty with a ride height mere millimetres from the ground, you’ll know the pain of misjudging a speed bump. In fact, it could just be a slight change in elevation as you pull into your driveway that delivers that painful graunch. The noise your car makes as its undercarriage rubs against harsh tarmac is gutting.

Complete list (CarThrottle.com)