When Peter Granleese cautiously steps out onto Bunda Street with cane in hand, he's placing his complete faith in Canberra's electric car drivers that they are watching out for him.
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The silence of many slow-moving electric cars, and their ever-growing numbers on Canberra's roads, is generating increasing trepidation for vision impaired people like Mr Granleese, and the proposed introduction of a mandated noise below 20km/h - as occurs in most other countries around the world - can't come soon enough.
"They [electric cars] are very hard to hear in a busy city street," Mr Granleese said.
"Shared roads like Bunda Street where people are obliged to slow right down and watch out for pedestrians are not so bad but elsewhere, on places like Northbourne Avenue, it becomes a real issue, particularly in the wet.
"I've got sharp hearing so I've managed pretty well over the years; I've only been clipped by a wing mirror.
"But vision-impaired people whose other faculties have declined over time are concerned and it takes just one incident, one near-miss with a car, and it shatters their confidence."
Australian regulators have been painfully slow to adopt international regulations for an Acoustic Vehicle Alert System (AVAS), which was mandated in Europe back in 2019.
Most manufacturers have forged ahead with their own warning noises, but the lack of local regulation means it's a hit and miss on which models have it installed - and those that don't.
Canberra's new Yutong electric buses emit a doleful ding-ding-ding when they drop below 20km/h but other vehicles hum, whirr and zing like creations from a sci-fi movie.
And without a mandated volume level, the sounds some EVs generate at low speed get lost in the general ambient city noise.
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Vision Australia's Chris Edwards said Australia should be following the example of the rest of the world quickly, giving the local rapid rise in EV sales.
"We're pleased significant steps have been taken to address what is a serious safety issue for all pedestrians, not just those who are blind or have low vision and who rely on other sensory faculties for independence and safety," he said.
With clever software and open slather on creating their own EV "sound signatures", car companies are producing some bizarre sound bites.
The Swedish-Chinese Polestar EV, for instance, delivers a warning like the radio frequencies emitted by far-off galaxies, some Teslas sound like the hoverboard in Back to the Future, while BMW enlisted the skills of Grammy award-winning German composer Hans Zimmer to generate its own soundscape.
Curiously, some car makers are making their silent EVs noisier just for the fun of it. In September, the new Abarth 500e, based on the Fiat 500, will arrive here with an outward-facing speaker underneath its rear window.
For six months, engineers in Italy worked on a sound generator for the Abarth which recorded all the sounds that the petrol engine model makes and fed them into a software program. The faster the electric car goes, the louder it gets, just like the petrol one.
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