It is certainly one of the challenges facing electric car companies and the motor industry in general.

Keep your eyes peeled to this website to find out the results later in the month.

And yet in this latter case, a number of local councils in the UK have found the opposite to be true. Reducing the amount of “street sign clutter” (to quote the useful browser search term) makes drivers take greater responsibility and adopt more cautious driving behaviour, so reducing average speeds. An added bonus is the reduced visual pollution of streets.

We must allow for the possibility of an equally counter-intuitive result from quieter cars. Accurate tests may show that both pedestrians and drivers of such vehicles become more attentive and cautious of each other and so help to improve road safety.

Rather than provide alarmist soundbites, some official body needs to investigate this theory.

And what is the official response? We need to make them all noisier again!

The blind have been really lucky up until now; they haven’t had to witness some of the monstrocities of earlier EV designs. Now if RoSPA get their way, they’ll have to put up with the aural equivalent, along with the rest of us.

There has GOT to be a better solution to this.