Nothing is perfect in life. Electric vehicles may provide you with great fuel economy and a practically noiseless ride, but the latter quality is a double-edged sword. Like certain bodily gases, electric cars can be silent but deadly. In this case, the people most at risk are the visually-impaired and maybe old people. They just don’t hear them coming.

To address this issue, a group of carmakers and advocates for the blind have banded together to present to Congress a proposal for minimum noise levels that future electric and hybrid vehicles would be required to make.

A study by the NHTSA last year found that hybrid vehicles tend to hit pedestrians proportionally more often than other types of vehicles in scenarios where the approaching vehicle could not be seen. The language presented to Congress by the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, the American Council for the Blind, and the National Federation for the Blind, could become part of the Motor Safety Act of 2010, a bill currently before Congress that would create a whole host of new auto safety rules.

The kind of sounds allowed for electric cars will be limited. That is, vehicle owners would not be able to “customize” the sound of their car the same way they can download ringtones for cell phones, because such a thing is prohibited (that’s too bad). Instead, car manufacturers would provide an approved sound or set of sounds for a given make and model of car.

Source: CNNMoney

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