Why You Might See 'Hair' Coming Out Of Your Car's Exhaust

Every car is built differently. Some cars even have wild features like lightning rod shifters to push the envelopes of style, performance, and user experience. However, there's one standard feature hidden inside vehicles that can actually spell horror for owners unaware of its existence. A woman even called the police after seeing this feature hanging from the exhaust pipe of her car. What did she find, you might ask? A large clump of what appeared to be human hair, dangling from the end of her car's tailpipe. Although the bizarre sighting seemed to signify a crime, it turned out that the hair was a normal feature of her car.

The hair that gets coughed out by an exhaust isn't really human hair. Instead, it's fiberglass, and its purpose is to absorb sound inside the muffler so the noise that comes out of the tailpipe isn't as loud. Automotive repair and teardown expert YouTube speedkar99 – who cut open a glass pack muffler to demonstrate how the hair-like material is arranged and wrapped in a sack inside the device — says the fiberglass converts sound to heat, which in turn reduces exhaust noise. This would mean that any sighting of the fiberglass hair from your car's exhaust pipe is an indicator that the muffler is failing. If you don't address the issue, your muffler will eventually be less effective at containing the sound produced by the engine's exhaust gases.

Not all cars have fiberglass hair inside them. This is because there's a variety of mufflers available on the market, and many of them use other sound-absorbing materials and designs instead of the fiberglass pack. For instance, the most common type of muffler, called the chambered muffler, combines resonating chambers and metal plates to alter the exhaust sound and make it more appealing to the ears. Another type is the straight-through muffler, which features a perforated central tube. When the exhaust sound passes through the tube, some of it escapes through the holes, which reduces the noise that escapes the tailpipe. There's also the turbo muffler, which is much quieter than the other types, thanks to having the perforated tubes in an S shape.

Vehicles with multiple tailpipes, including cars with a quad exhaust system, are not necessarily noisier than those with a single exhaust. While many of them do produce louder and deeper sounds, some can also be quiet, depending on the mufflers and resonators they have built in. Several modern cars are also designed with fake multiple exhaust tips for aesthetic purposes, so they don't really make a lot of noise. Meanwhile, most of the best-sounding cars ever made are performance cars for a reason. Owners of these cars treat the loud exhaust sounds as part of the driving experience. They get excited just hearing their engines rev and scream, signifying speed and power on the road.