Germans and their Horns!

BMW, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Audi, Porsche – all German, all good. From the late 90s driving a German car has changed from being just a dream to an affordable reality for a lot of Indians. Great stuff indeed. German cars are arguably the best in the world, better than even the Japanese. Now, we get to drive the same cars that the Europeans drive out there – the same power, the same engines, the same experience.

But there is a downside to having that in place though. And I’m not talking about the roads. What I’m talking about is horns! Yea, well, it may seem like a trivial issue, but believe me, it’s not. India is a country of haphazard traffic and ultimate tarmac chaos. When you have every car squeezing through every inch of space available to get ahead of the next guy, and a mix of two wheelers thrown in there in good proportion cutting through as well, what you need in your car is a good squishy stress ball, a handy tyre iron or a really, really good horn!

Now most German cars do come with nice dual trumpets that should quite ideally scare the dung out of the toughest cows in your path – and I have no complaints on that front – but why-o-why do they make the horn switches so hard to press? I’ve used a BMW 325i for a while and then switched to a long-term Swift DZire before finally landing up with Adil’s Long-term VW Jetta now, and in both the German cars the biggest pain in the wrong place has been the horns. First off, you really have to stretch that thumb to get anywhere close to depressing the horn switch – which is fare enough – you have to learn to use it as less as possible and besides, the stretch is because of the steering mounted audio system controls. But once you do manage to reach the button, you really have to put in an effort to press it down. That is just not acceptable in this country.

Now we had a brief discussion about this in office the other day and the conclusion was simple. Those cars were engineered for driving around in Europe and such markets. They don’t use their horns much there – it’s considered impolite. To refrain from people using the horn in their cars, switches are deliberately kept harder than usual. Then when they bring those cars to India, they give the same specifications to local vendors – so the spring tension on the horn switch remains unaltered even if it is now being manufactured in India. After all, re-engineering a part may cost a whole lot of money in R&D and testing. But all I’ve got to say is this. This is India. Using your car’s horn isn’t impolite – it’s a way to communicate. And on that note, I’ll end this rant of mine with a statement that I use quite often in my friends circle – use your horn, after all, India is a horny country!