That's normal, because Herbie configurations has the "Herbie Personality Horn," which is the entire thing that makes Herbie has reactions etc. in this mod, I think. If you replace that horn with another one then Herbie is gonna lose their personality.
The "personality horn" is just the normal horn that activates automatically on impact instead of by H button I think. The personality itself is a complex LUA code that is related to dynamic engine horsepower and the self-repair mechanism.
Actually the LUA code is really self-explanatory and if you know some stuff about coding and look inside you can tell how it all works. The mod will tell the difference between Herbie and a normal Beetle by part names. If the configuration has any part with "herbie" in the name, it will treat it like Herbie, otherwise it will be just a normal car. This is called part validation. If it succeeds then it activates the emotions and the self-regeneration. The current personality setting is saved in settings/vehicles/bug/global_data.csv, and the min and max torque curves are in vehicles/bug/data/dynamic_torque_graph.csv. The dynamic curve is based on a formula that calculates it based on the min and max ones and something called torque amplifier. Then it gets saved in vehicles/bug/curves_cache in json format, and overrides the default engine torque curve. Then it modifies the engine thermals so the new curve doesn't cause overheating. Then it gets interesting, it detects the player's behavior, like counting the time without crashing, if crashed then detecting how hard the crash was, and based on that it increases a variable called "player trust". If the crash was hard enough then the horn sound plays, the intensity of the sound is relative to the hardness of the crash until a certain point where the crash is treated as "hard" instead of "medium". If a crash is "small" then it doesn't play the horn at all. For the first 3 hard crashes it also won't play the sound. The hardness of the crash is calculated by the amount of broken beams, which is probably related to why the deformation of this car is weird, the beams can't be grouped in large groups or else a small crash could break a lot of them at the same time and be detected as a hard crash. Also, if you do a wheelie, the wheelie time is calculated, and that gives extra player trust. Same goes for drifting, which is detected by wheel slip, and jumping which is detected by all the wheels being in the air. It can also somehow detect if you "cheated" the jump by just spawning the car in the air. If the player trust is very low the car will backfire and if it's very high it will do "excited hopping". There is also the beam regeneration that also only works if the car has any part with "herbie" in the name, and it's basically the same thing as the Beam Regenerator mod. It's easy to understand how this all works because the code is really well written, but it must have been EXTREMELY HARD to code and get it to work.
He... Can raise the hood by himself or on every car? Bro, you can't. You need to use the nodes, not the best way but pretty much the only way as far as I know.
