I have heard the future, and it is quiet

You have to hand it to Americans — we know a thing or two about marketing. Would people really eat fast food and chug soft drinks if they weren't told to do so all the time? Would consumers really rush out and buy iPads if they saw the price first and the features later? And would buyers put so much effort into finding the right car — or any car — if TV ads didn't lead them to believe they'd be the only driver on the road?

Detroit offers us a singular example of successful marketing. For four years now, General Motors (GM) has had the media excited about the Chevrolet Volt. The hype started long before anyone had seen even a prototype of this electric hybrid car. Now the product is almost ready. One month ago, the first factory-built Volt left the production line. Full-scale production will begin later this year. In Europe it will be called the Opel Ampera.

The car was marketed before it existed

Why put so much effort into promoting something that, until now, didn't exist? One reason was to counter negative publicity. Drivers of GM's only all-electric vehicle, the EV1, were outraged that the company recalled the cars and destroyed them instead of making them widely available in the 1990s — all documented in the 2006 film Who Killed the Electric Car?

Last year's bailout of GM left it 60 percent owned by the U.S. government and under more pressure than ever to be innovative.

Most importantly, though, demand for electric cars has finally arrived. Owners of a Toyota Prius, a hybrid vehicle with a gasoline and an electric motor, have noticed how much less fuel it needs and how, when stopped, the car's motor shuts down. There is a moment of calm at that intersection, at that railroad crossing, in that traffic jam.

The difference between the Prius and the Volt, however, is that the Volt's more powerful electric motor will be in use much more of the time. Its gasoline motor will function only as a backup or at high speeds.

Other manufacturers are promising us a choice of several electric cars by 2015. City driving will be a profoundly different experience when we can barely hear the traffic. Property on busy roads will greatly increase in value, and cars that aren't electric will finally seem as loud as they really are.

Will silent cars become silent killers?

Or maybe this is just a pipe dream. Efforts are being made by conservative groups in both the U.S. and the E.U. to require vehicles to make noise, whether their engines produce it or not. The thinking is that silent cars will become silent killers if we don't hear them coming.

But do we hear individual vehicles above the din of traffic anyway? Don't we all know to look both ways before crossing the street? And shouldn't drivers be allowed to hear things around them, too? "texsteve", a Prius owner, joked on The Economist's website:

"Following the hand-wringing logic of the folks concerned about the quietness of electric cars, shouldn't all potentially harmful 'quiet things' such as bicycles, large birds of prey, and nuns with rulers, be equipped with noisemakers to warn of their approach?"

Given the obsession with noise, it's worth wondering whether there is a market at all for electric motorcycles. But get this: Chinese and German inventors are now building electric airplanes. And having had a respite from aircraft noise during the spread of the volcanic ash cloud, many Britons now want to be spared that noise one day a week — or even one day a year. If there's one thing we can thank the volcano for, in spite of all the inconvenience, it's an appreciation of silence — at least on the European side of the Atlantic.