The Challenge of Creating Realistic Car Sounds for Electric Vehicles

Christophe Haubursin, a myopic video director at Vox, spoke to four sound designers who explained the unique challenge of creating realistic sounds for electric vehicles, which are silent by design. This silence is not only disconcerting, but it is dangerous for all road users, including the driver.

For more than a century, the internal combustion engine powered vehicles through a complex combination of moving parts and tiny explosions. This combustion process inevitably created noise, and that noise came to define the background soundscape of our roads, our cities, and our daily lives. But as hybrid and electric vehicles became more commonplace—and more of their near-silent electric motors hit the streets—it became clear that quiet vehicles had no place in the ecosystem we’d built around cars.

Various organisations working with the visually impaired are pushing for specific legislation requiring electric vehicle manufacturers to install skeuomorphic sounds in their new cars via hidden speakers.

These hidden speaker systems, called “acoustic vehicle alert systems” (AVAS), had to meet certain sonic criteria. But they also provided a blank canvas for sound designers to decide what the cars of the future should sound like.

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