What noise should an electric car make?

One of the great pluses of electric cars is that they are so quiet. The driver’s seat is a peaceful place to be, although safety regulations dictate they must emit artificial noise to alert pedestrians to their presence when travelling below certain speeds.

Now that steps have been taken to prevent the visually impaired from falling victim to their silent menace – a subject that for some reason provokes laughter, but they have killed people, so they now make a friendly bleep – another sense can be spared the intrusions of the combustion engine.

But no. Car manufacturers, concerned we’ll feel deprived, are investing in replacement forms of noise. The electric engine, as they used to say in the Westerns, is ‘quiet, too quiet’. It is almost as if Hyacinth Bucket had decreed that the four-wheel equivalent of a lull in tea-party conversation calls for someone to make a noise – any noise – to avoid a sense of social failure. So large amounts of money are being spent in filling the gap.

The obvious way to do so is to ape the sort of throaty vroom that traditionally goes with belting down the motorway, and when I was speeding alongside Lombardy’s Lago Maggiore the other week in BMW’s (electric) i4 M50, I could hear the case for that. The car goes like a rocket, as even the most diehard of petrolheads have admitted, but BMW offers optional noise (paler, less testosterone-charged) lest they feel nostalgic. Other companies are seeking to fill the void but no one is showing quite the commitment – and cultural sensitivity – to compare with BMW.

The person behind the big push is Renzo Vitale, a 42-year-old Italian PhD engineer and musician. Rarely has filling a gap that didn’t need filling been taken so seriously. He has teamed up with double Oscar-winning composer Hans Zimmer (Lion King, Gladiator, Pirates of the Caribbean), not merely to modify your va-va-voom but also, he hopes, to shape the future of motoring.

The company wants Vitale to produce a sound experience that makes the driver say ‘That could only be a BMW’. He tells me: ‘Sound is one of the most effective elements in space-time travel… If you close your eyes and you play the sound of a tree, you’re in a park. You play the sound of water, you’re by the sea. Sound is the ultimate element of envelopment.’

Cars provide the current arena for his obsession. ‘Humans are defined by their voice and voice conveys feeling. If I don’t see you but I hear you, I can tell how you are feeling. This is your identity. Sound identifies people.’ The quietness of electric motors, says Vitale, presents ‘an opportunity to find that identity – cars have been hated in the past because of their noise. How can that be transformed? BMW is a lion that doesn’t need to roar to be looked at,’ he says. He is searching for sounds that enhance that distinct sense of ‘BMW-ness’ and is using any number of electronic and classical noises to create a variety of sensations. Different sounds go with different modes of driving.

For Vitale, this is art’s latest frontier. (Those with a low threshold for the avant-garde may wish to look away now.) At an event in Milan and on a drive with him from Lago Maggiore in BMW’s new iX XDrive 50, at times accompanied by a sepulchral, heavy, deep organ and vibrato strings, I heard the following phrases: ‘The driver is a performer’, ‘you hear the sound not so much of a machine but of an idea’, ‘the car is a highly complex performative art installation’, ‘I have to thank art for what it can become not for what it is’, ‘I want people to understand what it means to listen and to perform and to find a language of electric mobility.’ How much this will mean to frazzled parents on the school run is debatable, although apparently there is research showing that nerves are calmed, and driving safer, in this new world of sound.

Vitale is highly skilled, both as a musician and engineer. What is fascinating is that BMW, despite a degree of internal resistance, has put their shirt on him. ‘You can change things at BMW but you have to fight for them,’ says Vitale, who joined the company in 2015 as an engineer. ‘You have to prove it is something worth investing in. Let’s say there have been many interesting moments and conversations… I don’t want to sound pretentious but I was saying “Don’t worry… be sure that we’re going to do something special”. I was so sure about this.’ Now, he says, they are ‘active, supportive and committed’. New iterations of Vitale’s art are appearing all the time, with refinements and customisations in the offing.

But the question stands: isn’t silence, or your own choice of music or whatever, the preferable accompaniment to driving? He says the marketing people have been very positive about the public reaction. ‘You can have your silence, but if you are open to trying something else, come and try this car. I am very, very confident that people will engage in this conversation. Give us an opportunity. Drive it without preconceptions. If you don’t like it, fine.’

Isn’t it a fact of life that a great many potential buyers enjoy the showing-off, the head-turning roar of a combustion engine, though? No optional extra will ever replace it. For Vitale, it’s a fundamental question. Many people, he admits, ‘are searching for confirmation in others’ eyes and the car is one of the easiest ways of getting attention, of being praised, though for something you haven’t done. You are showing your status, but it is an easy way out’. To show personality you need to decide who you are, to define your identity. That is the way to recognition and respect. Buying a sweater with a prestigious logo, for example, will not do that for you. Be your own person rather than someone who seeks easy acclamation.

And without screaming for attention, you can say ‘yes, there is another way’, something that ‘goes beyond’, that brings some elegance and is a bit more sophisticated. ‘Don’t remain at the logo, at the first level. If you go a few steps further you might find a depth that is also a positive for you. Go to the brand that speaks to you.’

So for BMW, read sophistication, and of a particular type. That is the message. Here I have to ask him a difficult question. The Brits are famously rumbustious, disrespectful of pretension, philistine even. Will they be receptive to such a pitch? Other companies have their gimmicks. Won’t British petrolheads see this venture into soundscapes in the same light? Vitale admits some markets will be more receptive than others, though he mutters respectfully about a need in some quarters for education, personality and capacity for listening. In other countries and cultures – China, for example – ‘we know they like to have the opportunity to show other people. Maybe because it shows you have something that someone else does not. And you can show it right away. It is something audible and tangible’.

Will this venture make a buyer choose BMW ahead of another brand? It seems unlikely, although sound is moving up the rankings in buyers’ hierarchy of preferences. In any case, it is an area that says something about how BMW wants to be regarded. It’s a new dimension in their identity, but Vitale is not stopping there. He is also in charge of acoustics with Rolls-Royce, which is owned by BMW. Now there is something for a British philistine to get used to.