When Rahul ‘Micromax’ Sharma launched his new range of electric bikes called Revolt, the first TV ads did not talk about the bike’s features, but about the sound! For context, an electric bike does not make any noise at all, so Revolt folks installed a speaker in the bike and offer 4 programmed sounds!!
There are rules in several countries already that all electric vehicles must make some noise, even if they cannot, given the lack of combustible gas engines. This is for pedestrian safety!
So, instead of merely considering this as a legal mandate, many automobile brands are using this as an opportunity for sonic branding! The Revolt is one example.
Here are the sounds from the following brands: Harley-Davidson LiveWire electric bike, Jaguar I-Pace, Revolt bikes and Audi e-tron.
Most large carmakers are also working on creating unique sounds for other things like reverse (where India still uses Hindi film tunes!).
Hence, ironically, even if our roads could technically be silent due to electric vehicles, we’re using our historical behavior (pedestrian movement guided by car engine sounds) to continue the same pattern using simulated sounds! This is very similar to using the floppy disk image to denote ‘save’, long after floppies have ceased to exist!