This is sensible but even more important is the need for some noise-making system for electric motor cycles and scooters, etc. Adoption of electric two wheelers is likely to rise even more rapidly than cars, especially in developing countries.
Motor cycles, often approach very fast and are first detected by their noise and if almost silent would present a real danger on the roads.

I sure hope the committees studying what sound to use get sent packing. To be recognized, a car should sound like other cars. While I'm here - those back-up alarms are good for semi-trailers in yards where children trespass. On an all-night street excavator, they are a major health hazard and provide no extra warning. If I ever get run over by one of those, it is because I've learned to ignore that signal at all times.

It would also be safer if a specific noise would be created when a silent car start moving. With a conventional car, you can differentiate a started car from a waiting car by the sound, which is convenient when walking inside a parking lot. Maybe a luminous signal would also be safer for people that have impaired audition.

If only humans got ability to receive and analyze visual stimuli... oh wait... we have eyes...
Why not start using them to look around while walking across the street? Too radical?

Making electric cars generate a noise is misguided. Here we have a non polluting mode of transport that helps with noise pollution as well as air pollution and carbon pollution. Every car is provided with a brake and is driven by somebody with vision. These wonderful cars also have a horn for emergencies. Pedestrians have vision to see what is coming. Why therefore, do we need to create more noise pollution. Is this the oil lobby trying to vainly resist the onward march of the clean, quiet, electric car, surely the transport of the future where all our cities will have fresh air and silent except for the noise of rubber on tarmac.

This is complete insanity. Just wind forward a few years when the proportion of EVs to ICEVs is reversed and imagine the total cacophony that will assault ones ears walking down a busy inner city street. And why only on vehicles weighing less that 4t? Don't bigger ones hurt more when they hit you? And if EVs, why not Rolls Royces and other posh motors that, especially from the front, make no noise? Surely our respective governments have more important things to think about? What difference will it make anyway when most pedestrians have a set of earphones stuck in their ears listening to 'music' loud enough to drown out even the arrival of the Four Horses of the Apocalypse?

Make a noise like a highly tuned big capacity V8 running on open pipes and I may not laugh quite so much at these battery cars. More seriously, idiots manage to get hit by diesel buses and big trucks, neither of which can be called silent. As long as pedestrians "lose" themselves in social media and music played too loudly, ten walk in front of moving vehicles they are beyond saving.

I have to use rather long private gravel road. It is so narrow that it is not possible to pass pedestrians, if they don't notice car coming. Very often they don't notice. I don't have an EV. I drive an old, not so silent car. If I would trust pedestrians to hear my car and move away, I would knock down a pedestrian once a week.
So an EV will have irritating noise added. If drivers trust pedestrians to hear that, accident will increase.
My house is not beside that road, but others are. For safety I have to pass those houses < 30 km/h. It is also speed limit. I sometimes drive after midnight. Of course no noise is necessary in dark (no street lights).
This is one of most idiotic laws ever made.

Here is another example of removing or re-directing the responsibility of the driver of a vehicle to operate in a safe manner. EV operators are no less responsible for road safety than ICE operators. If there's a pedestrian using the roadway, does having a noisy vehicle absolve the operator of the responsibility to ensure the pedestrian's safety? Another "solution" without a real problem.

How about a bluetooth message to those in the immediate vicinity that says "Hey, look up, dummy!"