This is Elvin, silent electric power truck. It's making a noise for itself. Designed at the university of Warwick in England, while researchers are trying to design what noise silent vehicle should make if they are forced to by law. Something professor Paul Jenning says it's now inevitable.

It's definitely coming, I think it's been prompted by the fact that there are now real statistics that sadly possibly showing an increasing accident rates for silent hybrid vehicles at the moment. I think it's only at low speed, I think, the interest is really at low speed while the quietness is most evident.

The Warwick manufacturing groups have spent years working with industry to make cars quieter. Now, they are in reverse gear.

So, what we want to do is to try to investigate sounds that are gonna be safe, a minimum effect in the enviroment and are gonna give some creativities for manufacturers.

The team want to know what kind of noise is most effective, and they've adapted Elvin to make different noises on different days. It is driven around the campus by one of the team to Sam Jo.

If you ask the general public what they think, I mean, an electric vehicle should sound like, you're more likely to get an answer that relates back to science fiction movies. So, we have had also some suggestions from the Jackson' to Star war, Star Treck.

The sounds have been designed by Novelson, a consultancy that develops tools to help car manufacturers predict future behavior, including how our towns and cities might sound in 20 years, if we all got an electric.

It's all very well to investigate what one car sounds like because it drives around in today's enviroment. But what happens when you have hundreds of them, thousands of them.

Researchers say modern cars are now so quiet that any future legislation could apply to all vehicles, not just the electric ones.

Stuart McDill, Reuters, Coventry

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