Sounds off – Will electric cars ever sound any good? | Opinion

Walking around the coolest work space I have ever seen, with my jaw either hanging slack or loudly whispering things like “Oh my God, that’s an actual Oscar statuette”, “Wow, Kung Fu Panda” and even “I knew he was good, but I didn’t know he worked on THE SIMPSONS!!!” I really came to believe that everything was going to be all right.

It had always seemed quite obvious to me that coming up with the new, entirely fake sounds that electric cars would have to make to replace the glorious, explosive, percussive and emotive noises that internal-combustion engines make while turning fuel into energy, and noxious gases, was going to be tough. 

A Ferrari at full revs is a fantastic thing, a sound that stirs your soul and stays with you. A piece of what is effectively music, or sound FX, coming from a keyboard is never going to be as magically moving, even if that keyboard – the one I was looking at in that giant, rococo-styled office – belongs to Hans Zimmer.

You can think of Zimmer as the Salieri to John Williams being Mozart. He is the almost greatest scorer of film in my generation and worked on just about every Christopher Nolan film ever made, as well as things like The Lion King (that would be what he won the Oscar I was ogling for), Scorsese’s epic Gladiator and, more recently, the good Dune movies.

The reason I was allowed to stand in the same room as him – looking at the giant film screen, banks of computers and other doodads he works on – was that BMW had hired him, at no doubt enormous expense, to come up with the sounds its electric vehicles would produce. His first job was the simple start-up chirps and bells – imagine how much someone made out of the Microsoft Windows noise, way back when – before they put him on to making the more exciting, and important, noises its M Performance EVs would make as they acclerate.

We listened politely, even with great interest and, in his studio, it all sounded pretty good, if a little bit sci-fi (he had recently done Blade Runner 2049). 

Unfortunately, a few years later, when I drove a BMW i4 on the road – up to that point the most enjoyable and involving EV money could buy – I realised that the most important button in the whole car was the one that turned the noises off. I hated them. Almost every passenger I took in the car hated them, or just laughed at them (one photographer loved them, but he’s a total weirdo).

They would have been fine in a space-ship chase scene, but in a car, in the real world, they just felt like someone pretending. Like a child came up with it, because no one else really wanted to, because they all prefer real engine noises.

Sadly the idea that EV makers are producing these things for the drivers of the future, who grew up gaming, falls down when I look at all the teens I know, 98 per cent of whom have no interest in getting their licence, and would genuinely rather have a bus pass and a set of Apple Vision Pro goggles than a car of their own.

One of the many things that Tesla has gotten right – and perhaps the most surprising – is that their vehicles don’t make stupid noises. Someone there, perhaps even Elon Musk, realised that the competitive advantage of EVs is their silence, and that putting noise back in makes no sense.

Sadly, that theory falls down when it comes to performance cars and enthusiast drivers, who really like to feel and sense acceleration, and deceleration, as viscerally as possible.

This hit me afresh when I drove the astonishing Hyundai Ioniq 5 N recently, with its ersatz gearbox, which I loved, and its fake tachometer, which is great, neither of which really work or make sense unless they’re accompanied by some kind of noise.

Unfortunately, while a gearbox can convince me it’s real by surging the power when I shift imaginary cogs, and my brain enjoyed seeing revs rise again, the accompanying noises were almost as awful as letting Celine Dion score a film.

Two of the sound profiles, Supersonic (I mean really, the name is bad enough, but telling us it’s supposed to sound like a jet fighter is borderline embarrassing) are almost wilfully awful; as if Hyundai doesn’t want you to use them. The upshift sound in Evolution mode sounds like a robot shitting its pants.

Then there’s Ignition, which does a passable job of sounding like an i30 N at full noise. Only the i30 N, which costs half as much as the Ioniq 5 N, actually sounds about 10 times better, because it’s real.

The weird thing is that some driving video games actually produce noises – particularly in the case of F1 games – that are damn near better than the real thing, particularly since Formula One cars were ruined with the abandonment oF proper, V10 screaming, deafening engines. 

So will it get better? Are fake noises ever going to convince a cynic like me, or any cranky old car enthusiast?

Or is this as good as it gets? One can only hope for salvation. Normally, I’d put my money on Porsche at this point, but sadly the optional sounds on a Taycan are trash, too.