The Challenge of Creating Realistic Car Sounds For Electric Vehicles

Christophe Haubursin, a myopic video producer at Vox, spoke with four sound designers who explained the unique challenge of making realistic car sounds for electric vehicles, which are silent by design. This silence is not only disconcerting, it is dangerous for anyone on the street, including the driver.

For over a century, the internal combustion engine powered vehicles with an intricate combination of moving parts and tiny explosions. That combustion process inevitably made noise, and that noise came to define the background soundscape of our roads, cities, and day-to-day life. But as hybrids and EVs became increasingly mainstream — and more of their near-silent electric motors filled the streets — it became clear that silent vehicles didn’t fit in the ecosystem we’d built around cars.

Various organizations addressing the visually impaired were behind specific legislation that required electric vehicle companies to install skeuomorphic sounds in their new cars through hidden speakers.

These hidden speaker systems, called “Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems” — or AVAS — had to meet certain sonic criteria. But they were also a blank slate for sound designers to decide how the cars of the future should sound.