They’re up and running in France. First ‘noise’ cameras from the cops trialing on real roads and just one catches hundreds on it’s first Sunday ‘live’. Uh oh…

It was nearly two months ago that we first brought you the news that the UK is to undergo trails of the so-called ‘acoustic cameras’ in the UK – new tech where microphone-enables roadside tech can pinpoint vehicles with loud exhausts. Now the same technology has gone on live trial in France.

Sited in the Yvelines region near Paris, specifically on the 17-corner rider’s road in Saint-Forget (take note of this specific detail if you’re out that way this summer) the units have been given the snazzy name of ‘Medusa’ according to the newspaper Le Parisien.

So far, so Orwellian, but here’s the rub. It’s reported that on Sunday the multi-microphoned unit on this particularly nice bit of road indicated 450 “peaks of noise”. What that means in terms of how loud the vehicles were, nobody is saying right now. But the fact that this number has been made public is clearly a push to persuade the public at large that this emerging tech is the way to go in terms of solving the perceived ‘noisy vehicles’ menace.