Since the beginning of this month, new electric and hybrid vehicle models coming into the Australian market for the first time must have an Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System (AVAS). New sales of existing models already available here also require AVAS from late next year.
What Is AVAS And What Are The New Australian Rules?
An Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System emits sound when a vehicle is travelling at low speeds. New electric/hybrid models are required to have AVAS under Australian Design Rule 113/00, which came into effect on November 1, 2025. For models currently approved for sale, they’ll need to be compliant (new vehicle sales) by November 1, 2026. As for current owners of electric/hybrid vehicles, they will *not* need to make their vehicles compliant.
The Design Rule specifications are applicable for a speed range of greater than 0 km/h, and up to 20 km/h.
The nature of the alert sounds can vary and be driver-selectable, but must be in compliance with Australian Design Rule 113/00 and approved. I’m assuming sounds such as farting noises, or of a V8 internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle with a dodgy muffler won’t make the grade.
A vehicle equipped with an AVAS cannot emit an overall sound level of more than 75 dB(A) when driving in forward direction. That’s around the noise level of a vacuum cleaner. The minimum sound levels overall are 47 dB(A) when reversing1 and 56 dB(A) moving forward; around the noise level of a quiet conversation. There are also guidelines concerning the frequency of sounds, and their relationship to dB(A) levels when moving forward.
The AVAS requirement was originally announced in April last year. More detail on Australian Design Rule 113/00 – Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems for Quiet Road Transport Vehicles can be found here.
It’s (hardly) worth mentioning that the new AVAS requirements also apply to hydrogen fuel cell electric vehicles (HFCEV). I state “hardly” as only 33 had been sold in Australia from 2022 to the end of the third quarter this year. Just 2 of that total were purchased in 2025 to the end of Q3 according to the Australian Automobile Association. HFCEV light passenger vehicles in Australia are increasingly looking like a non-starter.
On a related note, the Australian Automobile Association indicates a record number of battery electric vehicles were sold in the September 2025 quarter (just), and sales of hybrids and plug-in hybrids also increased while internal combustion vehicle sales dropped off.
Why AVAS?
Pedestrian safety. While at higher speeds tyre noise is enough to act as an alert, at very low speeds an EV/hybrid might not be heard by pedestrians.
Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government Minister Catherine King said last week:
“AVAS has proven to be clear and effective in keeping people safe, so we’re making it compulsory.”
According to the Federal Government, it’s been estimated AVAS will prevent 68 fatalities and 2,675 serious injuries by 2060, or on average, one fatality and 75 serious injuries each year. Furthermore:
“As well as reducing road trauma, a key priority of the Australian Government, it is also estimated to save the community over $200 million by 2060,” states the announcement.
We’ve had our BYD Atto 3 since April 2023, and it had an AVAS system from the get-go. It was a bit of a head-turner as the sounds were rather loud, but we found that preferable to potentially bowling over a pedestrian.
There have been improvements to the BYD AVAS system since, but at the time some Atto 3 owners were physically disconnecting the AVAS as there wasn’t a way to disable or control the sound level via the central touchscreen. I’m not clear on how physically disabling it would go down in court or with an insurer if there was an accident at low speed involving a pedestrian. But under the rules for new vehicles, AVAS *cannot* be turned off.
Footnotes
- A vehicle doesn’t need an AVAS system that operates when the vehicle is reversing if a reversing alarm is already fitted. ↩
About Michael Bloch
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what’s wrong with the sound of a nice noisy V8, my father has one of those for his old 4cyl 2wd Toyota hilux.
Cost about 20 bucks and plugged into the cigarette lighter socket and played happy V8 sounds over the car stereo system, controlled by the alternator chop in the electrical system, so when you accelerated, so did the V8 sound coming out of the stereo.
He loved using it in shopping centres, caravan parks and at boat ramps. Made all the young blokes eyes bulge.
Yes, we definitely need more noise! On our roads, in our neighbourhoods, everywhere. The ‘fun’ of motorists should always trump (sic) the valid concerns of shift workers to have an undisturbed sleep during daytime hours. If the current trend with noisy motorbikes, cars, leaf blowers, mowers, gras cutters, chain saws etc. continues, our hospitals and polics stations will 9-5 operations only!
My 2023 Tesla Model Y wasn’t originally fitted with an Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System. Realising how quiet the vehicle was at low speed, I retrofitted a speaker and paid the fee to have it activated.
My only regret is that I cannot use that speaker to make my Tesla sound like it has a V8, or turbo-charger with blow off device. Something to make my car fit in with the noisier side of the community!
Boring as it maybe, probably should be a standard sound & level across the board so pedestrians can learn to listen for it and assess distance.
Whatever is chosen Lindsay, it should be designed to include a varying pitch, so those with certain hearing losses can hear some part of the hertz frequency range.
Those with noise induced hearing loss typically lose most of the higher tones, and those go first too with normal loss of hearing from about age 50.
The other main point people are making here about many ICE vehicles is justified too . . .
My Elantra and other such can hardly be heard when parked idling, or idling along or at carpark speeds, so the call for something like this for all vehicles is probably something that could be considered.
Interesting to read your comment about your BYD ATTO 3. Prior to last update or two, you could change and disable the AVAS. I am not near the car atm to check if you still can.
After the last service it no longer makes any sound at low speed. From your comment it seems they may have broken something during a service, which has unfortunately been par for the course with the crap over priced service arrangement. Still a great car.
“The minimum sound levels overall are 47 dB(A) when reversing”
Interesting that EVs are now required to have this but ICE aren’t (many industrial/commercial vehicles such as trucks do have a reverse alarm but most of the utes and SUVs don’t). ICE vehicles are nearly as quiet as an EV when travelling at low speed in reverse (and also at low speed going forward in such area as carparks) so they should have an alarm/noise maker too..
Lets go back to the ‘good ol days’! …. a person walking in front (or behind a slow moving vehicle – banging a drum or such like! What about bicycles?
MAYBE, whilst we are pedestrians, WE should be aware of what is going on in an area that vehicles are likely to be moving about LOL !
I am with you John, another way people can avoid taking responsibility for their own actions. These sounds will just annoy people and will make no difference to those with headphones anyway!
Who mentioned something about “natural selection”?
Hi Michael, our eDeliver 7 van purchased early last year also came fitted with AVAS, but I think ADR 113/00 should also apply to new ICE vehicles.
They are similarly quiet at the low speeds common around busy pedestrian crossings etc. Lots of sound deadening material around the engines and very effective mufflers on the exhaust mean they are audibly essentially indistinguishable from EVs at speeds under 20km/hr.
Some petrol engines are just as quiet as an EV, do they need it too?
Good point Horst,
A great friend of mine John Lasscock had a 1936 Rolls Royce and with no less than 5 mufflers, it was incredibly quiet despite it’s age.
Vale John.
The warning could be any sound that alerts pedestrians etc to an approaching EV. So something other than just a beeper could be useful, some relevant sound played through a speaker would be good.
So I think we should make it an appropriately Australian sound. My suggestion would be “Toot toot, chugga chugga, Big Red Car”(could possibly substitute car colour here, but I prefer authenticity).
It would serve the purpose and also honor the Wiggles, truly Aussie icons. And maybe earn them some extra royalties – though they certainly don’t need them!
How about a Kookaburra!
In my opinion this is very much overdue and should be back dated to existing owners. In my outer suburban area hedges and fences frequently come down to the footpath line and I have been almost skittled many times while walking my dog by these silent menaces backing out of their drives.
Last time I checked accessories, beepers were available to insert before the reverse light globe for existing owners, while not operational at low speed they would be a worthwhile stopgap measure.
I don’t have that problem, I learnt as a child to look both ways before crossing roads or driveways. I’m not against AVAS but it has to be balanced with some personal responsibility of pedestrians to not blindly walk onto areas that a vehicle might be travelling.
I’d also like to see AVAS being mandatory for bicycles, scooters and the like, both manully powered and electric. The amount of times I’ve been in near misses from behind (and a couple of times been hit) on the footpath is insane – not a shared path by the way. The main offenders have been food delivery bikes & old guys who shouldn’t wear lycra. I also find it insane that e-bikes do not have to be registered, considering that without a license plate there is little you can use to identify them when you’ve been skittled and they take off!
WhileI agree this is a good improvement, as an elderly person, I find people on electric bikes much more dangerous. They share footpaths and have often have no respect for pedestrians. In my day a bell on a bicycle was expected and rung.
Wholeheartedly agree John!
There are few rules on E-bikes, and what exist are seemingly often ignored and just as often not policed. As usual, the various Aussie governments were incapable of looking at the multitude of overseas problems/examples prior to approval here (Vapes also spring to mind!). Now we plod along trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
If it is a safety concern, then why not for all vehicles on the road, not just single out EV’s?
I really don’t like this change as it put’s the onus onto the pedestrian rather than the driver to be careful of pedestrians. Drivers really need to slow down in the streets and pedestrian areas and be more careful
The emphasis is always on the driver to be aware of what is happening in their surroundings. However, people have too often relied on their hearing before stepping out onto a roadway or driveway and if they heard nothing just proceeding rather that properly doing a visual check as well.
Once a person has bounced off the front of an approaching car it is too late to be arguing about blame.
100% Patrick! Step off the footpath and the Pedestrian MUST become aware of what is going on! How many times have you seen a pedestrian texting on the phone then stepping off the curb and walk across the road TOTALLY oblivious to what is going on around them?
If every car is fitted with this noise making device, can you imagine the horrific increase in noise in these environments!
I am ‘elderly’, I drive, I ride and I walk. When in walk mode, I take appropriate precautions and take PERSONAL responsibility.
It seems in our society, it is all too easy to point a finger and blame ‘someone or something’ else for our own shortcoming.
Modern petrol engines are also very quiet, so should not be exempt from this rule. It would have been better to set a minimum sound level for all vehicles.
Our Nissan Leaf is equipped with a window in front of the driver, who can then see and avoid pedestrians. Works well for deaf pedestrians too.
While I don’t oppose the new ADR I find it intriguing that people did not complain about the Prius hybrid being too quiet well over a decade ago. It seems that people have become grumpier in recent years and object to things like solar farms, wind farms and EVs because they have been stirred up by anti-renewable voices.
I agree that reversing alarms can make drivers less careful. I researched this issue 25 years ago when looking at the tragedy of kids run over on driveways. Young kids don’t understand the danger (and can be attracted to the sound). Then there are pedestrians who are hard of hearing, wearing headphones or chatting on the phone.
My research is documented here:
https://vdrsyd.com/mp/driveways.html
A family member has a Hyundai I30 Hybrid. It plays a jingle when reversing. I cannot image a car park or traffic queue full of vehicles each playing ANY user selectable noise that does not mimic an old internal combustion engine. Cacophony!
This could be worse than the 173 different bings, bongs, bells, voices, and tingalings already in new cars about almost everything to alert the driver they are actually driving.
….. TOTAL chaos! Also defeats the intent as people will quickly adapt and IGNORE ALL such noises!
What about the electric scooters, travelling at up to about 40km/h along footpaths and in shopping centres?
The governments might as well simply allowed everyone to wander through shopping centres and along busy footpaths, swinging machetes.
I had a 2013 Mitsubishi PHEV for 5 years and it had a low speed warning alarm that sounded a bit like someone sliding a ceramic tile around randomly inside a piano! It was clearly audible, but many times I’d be driving in a car park where people were walking to/from their vehicles and mostly they didn’t hear it or perhaps did not realise it was coming from a moving car. I never honked the horn for fear of causing a heart attack, but the sound was too weird to associate with some sort of warning, so finding a spot was sometimes a slow process.
That’s at least a start but I assume our govt here in NZ will not follow suit because think of the extra cost involved in compliance. The Used car importers would cry foul to start with as they would now have to start sourcing compliant cars.
Next step in this will be to enforce E-Bikes and E-scoots to have some form of warning sounds. Even adding the old Ice Block stick to the forks to create a rattle sound would make them safer for the average pedestrian.
Imagine a car park full of these noises! How effective will be it be then. Happy to be proven wrong but I feel like this is a solution in search of a problem
…. sounds like a ‘cane toad’ solution! That worked well 🙂
I have a 15 yo diesel that people can’t hear in carparks. Maybe people a getting deafer. Keep this nonsense up and we will have to have someone walking in front of our cars with a kerosene lantern and waving a red flag.
I’m with you Ray
AVAS might be handy for high-speed footpath traffic too – disabled carts, scooters, speedy electrical things in general.
Or perhaps start equipping the world with three zones – pedestrian, cycles/scooters and motor cars/bikes. But maybe that’s asking too much. It feels like this is not about safety but about embarrassing EV drivers.
“Or perhaps start equipping the world with three zones – pedestrian, cycles/scooters and motor cars/bikes.”
i have a memory from about 50 years ago, that, in Palmerston North, New Zealand, one of the main entry roads to the city; Fitzherbert Avenue, had a paved footpath, then, on the road part, was a cycle track, then, the parking and then the lanes for motorised traffic.
It can be done, and, it has been done.
But, in Australia, road safety has never been taken seriously by governments.
It is like the bodgy road toll figures for Australia. The official “road toll” figures for Australia – the number of deaths involving road transport, are redacted to exclude the 1800 people that are killed each year, by the air pollutants from ICE vehicles.
Australia should have, and should have had, a scheme like what existed in New Zealand, that was abolished by the racketeers now running that country, whereby ICE vehicles were taxed according to the pollution, subsidising BEV’s, saving lives.
Bicycles have to have bells, and riders are trusted to use them selectively. I am not clear about the electric bikes (delivering food) that use bicycle paths often at great speed, trying to be stealthy as they navigate grey zones of parks. I am reluctant to use a horn in my EV that is designed to jolt any organism into evasive action, but there is no soft horn option. Constant noise emmitted not required for my bike, and residents of bike routes would hate to be woken up when I pass them early morning. We need to make others aware when we reverse as there are blind spots, but when I travel forward I am not expected to avert my gaze or close my eyes. It feels like “I hate EV’s because they are silent and do not disturb the neighbourhood”. Law written by Harley gangs and backfiring fossil vehicles?
Has anyone calculated how many early deaths a year there are due to excessive noise? I suspected not. I hope it will be repealed eventually. Let there be peace.