Unlike your standard heavy vehicle in reverse beeping, the bin lorries here say, "stand well clear, vehicle reversing," then a loud beep, over and over when they go into reverse.
It's nice that they're so polite.
You should go to Japan, commercial vehicles, service vehicles and emergency vehicles often have audible turn signal sounds, with their turns and reverses announced in Japanese (and in rare cases English).
That sounds cacophonous to the point that it would drive me insane, so I might skip Japan on my travel itinerary.
Prepare for insanity then as this is becoming the norm for the UK, I'm surprised you haven't experienced it yet.
A lot of construction machinery is now getting to the point it announces just that it is in use every 5 - 10 seconds. It is fucking obnoxious.
nothing could keep me from japan if I had the money and if it was pollution free for some reason or like we solved the whole pollution problem or such.
The funny part of that most of the vehicles in the Caribbean are second hand from Japan. It includes commercial vehicles so you can end up with a garbage truck speaking Japanese while reversing in Caribbean streets.
I like the little shuttle golf carts in Japanese airports: each cart plays a different tune as they drive along.
back shimasu back shimasu back shimasu
Yep usually interspersed with a couple back up tones.
The left and right signal voice is typically: Hidari (Migi) ni magarimasu. Gochuui kudasai. [= Will turn left (right). Please have caution].
Where I'm at, all the beepers sound broken, so it's this awful squawking noise. But it's purposeful, almost all large vehicles make that horrible noise.
If it sounds like loud bursts of white noise, then it's very much intentional.
The old style beepers were generally perfect waveforms with minimal harmonics, which has the side effect of being hard to identify the direction it's coming from.
White noise however is basically all harmonics, and if it's coming from a point source, it's very easy for us to identify exactly where it's coming from. It also has the bonus that it doesn't travel as far as the beeps too, so it sounds much louder closer and quieter further away, where you're not likely to need to know about a reversing vehicle.
The slight downside of the speaking ones is they assume everyone speaks the language, which won't ever be true 100% of the time. Sure most will figure it out, but every country has their morons.
On a tangentially related note I recently replaced a smoke detector and instead of just a loud beeper the damn thing talks, and it's been awhile since I've wanted to throw something electronic against a wall that much.
Could be worse.
Is it more or less annoying than the plain old beeping when you're trying to sleep?
I have no idea. Neither wake me up since I'm already awake.
Why not in Mrs. Buckets voice:
beep Mind the car, dear. beep
I was thinking it would be great to have citizen in there with like adam wests voice. Stand clear citizen a dangerous vehicle is reversing.