What noise should an electric car make?

One of the great pluses of electric cars is that they are so quiet. The driver’s seat is a peaceful place to be, although safety regulations dictate they must emit artificial noise to alert pedestrians to their presence when travelling below certain speeds.

Now that steps have been taken to prevent the visually impaired from falling victim to their silent menace – a subject that for some reason provokes laughter, but they have killed people, so they now make a friendly bleep – another sense can be spared the intrusions of the combustion engine.

But no. Car manufacturers, concerned we’ll feel deprived, are investing in replacement forms of noise. The electric engine, as they used to say in the Westerns, is ‘quiet, too quiet’. It is almost as if Hyacinth Bucket had decreed that the four-wheel equivalent of a lull in tea-party conversation calls for someone to make a noise – any noise – to avoid a sense of social failure.