Also I’ve noticed, at least in Australia. Bus horns are quieter than truck horns.
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Large trucks often use a compressed air system to power their brakes.
Someone thought, “hey, we got this compressed air lying around, let’s stick a horn on it!”
And lo, the truck gained a giant overpowered horn.
Trucks, specially tractor trucks (the ones with detachable trailers), use compressed air to keep the brakes off. This means they default to on (parking/handbrake) when they’re detached.
This means its very easy to make a compressed air horn, and in the case of the road trains, potentially even have extras if necessary. Where normal horns are just an electric speaker, pushed to it’s max, which aren’t very loud by comparison. They require a lot of power to make them loud, which most car/truck electrical systems aren’t, they’re relatively low voltage compared to say a concert tier sound system, which is probably what you’d need to make a comparably loud sound.
It’s already been explained that they operate on compressed air, but to add to that, it’s kind of a safety thing. A commercial truck that needs to blow that horn, also needs to make sure it’s heard. The little “beep beep” you get from a standard car horn doesn’t cut it when you need to warn somebody that may be blasting their radio that they just did (or are about to do) something stupid around a tractor trailer and that they might be about to die if they don’t un-stupid it.
Simple answer because they can be. As others point out trucks have compressed air on board for other things so why not use it for a stupid loud horn. I have a friend who is a trucker and he told me the trucks he drive also have a normal car type horn too. He can choose which horn to use but usually defaults to the air horn because why not, louder is always better!
My take; they are big vehicles that could potentially do a lot of damage, so they need to make more noise than others because they are more dangerous
truck horns are like big, booming shouts, while car horns are more like little beeps.
Truck horns are louder because trucks are much bigger and need to make sure other drivers can hear them, especially on noisy roads. Cars, on the other hand, are smaller, so their horns don’t need to be as loud.
As for buses, they’re kind of in the middle. They’re bigger than cars but not as big as trucks, so their horns might be somewhere in between in terms of loudness. Plus, buses often drive in busy cities where they need to be careful not to be too noisy.
So, in Australia, you might notice that bus horns are quieter than truck horns because buses are smaller and don’t need to be as loud. But all horns are important for letting other drivers know what’s going on on the road!
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