In today‘s urban environment inhabitants are permanently exposed to elevated noise levels, which are mostly dominated by traffic noise. The electrification of vehicles could influence the traffic noise in city centers. Road users such as pedestrians and cyclists are partly dependent on sounds of vehicles as a safety aspect. The Detectability of electric vehicle sounds is an important attribute for safety reasons. The aim of this work is to determine the detectability and annoyance of various electric vehicle sounds for a constant speed, single car pass-by situation. For this purpose, the differences in the perceived annoyance and detection time were investigated with perception studies. Therefore nine variants of electric vehicle sounds were generated. The results show that only a small change of the stimuli such as a frequency-chance influences the detection time enormously.