Kids today may be more

Kids today may be more 1 with the sound of a rushing highway than a rushing river. But imagine that the internal combustion engine could be set aside and we could 2 the soundscape of our future.What aural environment would you choose for traffic? For the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the answer is that new cars should sound like old cars. Hybrid and electric vehicles can be so quiet that people outside the vehicle can't hear them.So these too-quiet cars will be 3 to sound something like this. The Obama administration wants a million electric vehicles on the road by 2015. Slow sales of cars like the Chevy Volt and Tesla Model S may keep that 4 from being reached. But there are still hundreds of thousands of EVs and hybrids on the road today. It's hoped that the new rule will help prevent thousands of 5 and cyclist deaths. But the rule also hews to a possibly outdated 6 , like people who set their cellphone ringtone to sound like an old rotary phone. And it's wasting a chance to reimagine what our cars, roads and even cities could sound like.