ulling Ford’s new all-electric Mustang Mach-E out of a Brooklyn garage late this winter, I felt a little duped. It seemed more like I was driving a giant motorized iPad than the electrified successor to an iconic American muscle car.
The sound designers who spoke to TIME for this story, from companies like BMW, Audi and Ford, often framed their work as an effort to encode their brands’ ethos into a sound. There’s precedent for that kind of auditory corporate soul-searching, from ESPN’s six-note fanfare to the Yahoo yodel. But there’s greater urgency to the automakers’ work: the longer it takes for people to switch to electric vehicles, the more damage internal-combustion engines will do to our planet.
On the other side are carmakers that have little interest in replicating the sound of a gasoline engine at all. “We shouldn’t bethat there are moving pistons in this thing,” says Danni Venne, lead producer and director of innovation at Made Music Studio, an audio branding agency that designed the engine sound for a recent iteration of the Nissan LEAF. “We’re somewhere else now technologically.” The LEAF sound, Venne says, has “a little bit of a singing quality to it.
It would great add sound to the post.
Make em sound like Indy cars
Hey that's my idea. Patent pending.
silence would be perfect.
I’d prefer they not contribute to noise pollution.
Hi, I am a structural engineer from Iran who have many ideas. I have summarized some of my ideas on my page. I want to work with companies and investors. Do you want to cooperate?
How’s about… silence?
Now this is an interesting job - a sound engineer that adds special car engine noise to mimic what a real engine sounds like.
Imagine if they all were made to sound like Jeremy Vine ‘Get out the way, it’s Meeeeeeeeeee!’.
Electric cars are bad
Stop please. They should be as silent as possible
They will probably end up load and obnoxious.