Dragons' Den reject who designed ‘the world’s loudest bicycle horn’ hits over £3 million in global sales

Velo-drone wrote:

I'm shocked and amazed that a bunch of self-absorbed, heavily chauffeured money-men would reliably favour products that they want cyclists to want over ones that cyclists might actually want.

Shocked, I tell you.

Strange as I find it to defend the likes of that bunch of spivs, in fairnes you don't need to get it right every time
You don't even need to get it right more times than you get it wrong.
You just need to get it right when it matters, and that need only be once.

I think a lot of the reason they reject pitches is often down to the valuation/size of the stake in the company that's being offered, while there's plenty of terrible products or badly run business on there, there's lots that would be likely to succeed regardless but aren't going to provide a great return on investment at the levels they're asking for.

brooksby wrote:

There do seem to be a surprising number of businesses which turn up in the media, who are making shedloads of money despite having been rejected on Dragons' Den.  Perhaps the dragons don't have as good an eye as they (and their producers) think they do...

Well, they didn't take Moss's comfy bra.

Mind you, it did have an unintended pyrotechnic feature.

Well it's a TV show with a highly artificial setting that bears little to no relation to how they'd normally pick an investment. They've got 20 minutes to make a decision about a sector they may know nothing about after hearing the details from someone who might just be crap at pitching ideas, and who presumably has already been struggling to find investment if they're willing to contemplate giving away the enormous chunks of ownership the dragons usually demand. If they got it right every time it'd be a flat out miracle.

It's a pitch in its own right - "Dragons Den didn't realise how awesome our product is - but you can buy it today at 20% off!".

One of the Dragons Den rejects is very spammy, which irritates me.

joe9090 wrote:

Can we have an inventor come up with a samurai sword or cattle prod that is hidden in your handlebars with one handbar grip as the hilt?

I think a rather more overt AK-47 strapped to your back would work better.

I tried wearing a Hells Angels vest to intimidate drivers but they just laughed at me.. what's wrong with a outlaw biker riding a bicycle if his hog breaks down?

That's nice, you've moved on from advocating physical assaults on various cyclists whose actions you don't agree with and the physical abuse of young children to suggesting assaults on road.cc staff. You need help.

Why can road.cc not just suspend his account? Ample toxicity evident in so many of their comments...

Does seem a weird comment doesn't it. Just because the reviewer stated it doesn't seem loud enough to make babies cry he should be tortured with it? I expect all the other youtube users who reviewed / use it should also have the same treatment. As I've mentioned before, he definitely has never got the "Sticks and Stones" childrens rhyme definition and seems to see it as "use words, deserve to be sticked and stoned". 

Garage at Large wrote:

Well, as is freely available on the interwebs, 140db poses an "immediate danger to hearing", equivalent to a jet engine taking off. So either the 140db claim is incorrect, or the "assertive rather than aggressive" claim is incorrect. They cannot both possibly be true as claimed in the article. 

As it was the reviewer who made the assertion, what better way to test his claim than through my proposed experiment?

Bizarely I find myself agreeing here. And I did raise eyebrows at the assertive not agressive description for something which is 30db louder than would be standard on cars and vans, so 2x2x2x as loud as a car horn. with 130db being described as the threshold of pain.

Now of course it depends at what distance the 140db is measured at, as db reduce by 6 each time the distance from source doubles.

So 140db at 1m -> 134db at 2m, 128db at 4m

Therefore this horn at 32m away would be as loud as a jackhammer 1m away.

Well it doesn't really matter does it. The Trolling Prick now has it in his thick head that 140db horns are killing people and spooking Ponies in the New Forest into the paths of innocent motorists. 

In the USA, the maximum legal decibel level for a car horn on a passenger vehicle is 100-110; all states have a line in their vehicle laws and regulations that states a car horn can not emit an unreasonably loud or harsh sound. Not all of them have that exact wording, but they all make the same point.

140dB? Is that measured at the typical distance of the other party? Or at 1m, or at 1cm? Without knowing the distance the dB on its own is meaningless. It's like measuring the brightness (lux) of a torch shining on a white wall - depends how far the torch is.

I bought one a while back and it is undoubtedly loud but the problem I found was nobody actually *heard* it because it doesn't sound like anything that would come from a vehicle so it just gets ignored. You're better off shouting "hiya" or ringing a bell and not being an obnoxious git.

One of the reasons I went for an AirZound, recharges with bike pump.

I did have a siren by NightSun, had a high pitched tone, not a car horn.  The AirZound attracts drivers attention.

Garage at Large wrote:

As it was the reviewer who made the assertion, what better way to test his claim than through my proposed experiment?

Since a bike bell or horn will never be right next to someone's ear drum when it's actually being used, I think there are any number of better ways to test it. Duh.

Ahh, but as Boo likes his violence, the better ways won't be torture and painful. Remember if he can propose violence, especially against a cyclist, he will. 

I'm surprised he didn't mention that if a car driver was "spooked" by having one of these horns sounded near them, they had every right to force the cyclist into a ditch and drive off triumphant. 

Not sure you understand 'jet' engine noise. For starters commercial airliners have gas turbine rather than jet engines. Also they have reduced their noise footprint by over 90% since the first 'jets' came into service.

High bypass ratio gas turbine engines are getting quieter and quieter still - this info below from NATS doesn't even include the latest generation such as the Boeing 787 which is even quieter. Plus of course, you can't actually get close enough to an aeroplane to hear your quoted 140db.

https://www.nats.aero/environment/noise-and-emissions/measuring-noise/