Big Honkin' Horns Hit the Highway
Some SUV Owners Install Loud, Costly Air Horns; The Noise-Law Loophole
By MICHELLE HIGGINS
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 5, 2005; Page D1
Jim Stevenson bought a Hummer H2 a few years ago because he liked its "Tonka Toy on steroids" look. Everything about it was macho -- except for the horn. After a bunch of boys on a street corner signaled to him to honk, and were clearly disappointed, it was the last straw, says Mr. Stevenson, an Orlando, Fla., real-estate agent. "You have this big beast, and you hit the horn, and it sounds like Mike Tyson talking," he says. "It's truly embarrassing." So Mr. Stevenson went out and installed an air horn in his SUV. The new horn is so loud, he says, that sometimes when he honks it, people applaud. An official at General Motors, which makes the Hummer, says "the horn the truck comes equipped with meets all the requirements for safety." Mr. Tyson's manager declined to comment on the boxer's trademark high voice.
As the size of SUVs and pickup trucks has ballooned during the past few years, so has demand for bigger horns. The result is a fast-growing niche business of installing extremely powerful air-horn kits, many of which are based on locomotive horn designs. Some of the devices can cost upward of $1,000 and clock in at more than 120 decibels. (Roughly the sound of a jackhammer.)
Some of the horns are so big, they require special wiring and the installation of an air compressor roughly the size of a microwave oven... Adding air horns to passenger vehicles is the latest fad amid a booming trend in car customization, where drivers are outfitting their vehicles with everything from flashy wheels to expensive flat-screen DVD players. Retail sales of automotive specialty accessories like these totaled about $31.5 billion last year, up from $27 billion in 2002. Add-ons "have become a necessity," says Fadi Ajam, owner of Big Boy's Toys in Elmhurst, N.Y. His shop installs air horns in 300 to 400 vehicles a year, Mr. Ajam says.
A typical air-horn installation requires an air compressor and tank, along with enough room for two- or three-horn trumpets -- which can be up to 3 feet long. Some horns have four or more trumpets, which are similar in size and shape to the ones often perched on top of 18-wheelers. The devices can be so powerful that people standing near an SUV equipped with an air horn can actually feel the blast of air.
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Meanwhile, the neighbors are furious. For the past few months, Jose Lopez de Zaldo of South Beach has been periodically awoken in the wee hours of the morning by what he thought sounded like trains. "I was very perplexed," says Mr. de Zaldo. "I've been living in Miami Beach for 15 years and never heard train horns." In response to complaints from residents, Miami Beach police have stepped up efforts to track down and ticket train-horn blowers. Noise-ordinance violators can be ticketed or even arrested for blasting a train horn. Catching violators isn't easy. In a significant loophole in many sound ordinances, blasting an air horn may violate the law, but simply owning the horn isn't necessarily illegal. That forces police to catch people in the act of blowing the horn.
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Write to Michelle Higgins at michelle.higgins@wsj.com
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