European electric cars now need to be noisy too

The EU, which purports to be strongly in favour of the increased adoption of electric cars as a means of fighting climate change, has just put one more barrier in the way of the increased adoption of electric cars by ruling that all new electric vehicles have to have a "noise-emitting device", which sounds like a traditional gasoline engine, i.e. noisy. Existing vehicles are to be gradually retrofitted with noise-makers by 2021. (The USA finally passed a similar law in 2018, after several delays, which is to come into full force by September 2020. Canada is still thinking about it.)

One of the many advantages of electric cars is that they are quiet. Modern life is already way too noisy, and anything that can be done to reduce the ambient noise we are all subjected to is most welcome. So, it seems an awful shame that such a law is considered necessary, but the impetus has come from charities like Guide Dogs for the Blind, which complain that the blind and the visually-impaired may be surprised by quiet electric vehicles, especially when reversing. The new EU law mandates an acoustic vehicle alert system (AVAS) on all new electric vehicles for when they are travelling at less than 20 km/h or reversing, supposedly the times when cars are most likely to put pedestrians at risk. You can hear an example here (and yes, it's horrible). At higher speeds, the noise of the tires on the road and the aerodynamic noise of the moving car is apparently sufficient, although some of the charities are calling for electric vehicles to make a sound at all speeds.

I do understand the reason for the law, although you can tie yourself in knots over arguments about how many people are affected, whether people have a right to a quieter environment, and whether more people have been hurt as a result of quiet electric cars (even that is not definitively proven: for example, a US Dept. of Transportation report suggest that hybrids and EVs are 35% more likely to cause pedestrian injuries, but other reports note that overall pedestrian deaths continue to decrease even as EVs become more popular). The irony is that some other non-electric cars are just about as quiet nowadays, and this is increasingly a goal of many car manufacturers.

I must confess I had high hopes for quieter cities running silent electric cars and trucks one day, but that day may be further off than I thought. What a shame.