Noise Is Now The Only Reason To Cling Onto Internal Combustion
There’s nothing quite like the organic noise of a wonderful petrol engine. Whether your dish du jour is a woofly twin-turbo V8, a furious N/A V10 or a melodious, soulful V12 – or any one of a dozen different particularly sonorous engine configurations – nothing can replace the sound of your favourite engines under load.
My hand is up; I’m guilty as charged. At CT we do like to make a fuss about that. From the 4.7-litre Maserati V8 in the old GranCabrio to today’s bombastic blown 4.0-litre AMG flagship, I’ve not been shy about placing noise as the one reason why EVs can’t replace petrol-driven sports cars.
And yet… even to we most die-hard supporters of good ol’ suck-squeeze-bang-blow, the list of arguments in favour of turning liquidised ancient dead things into forward motion is growing bum-troublingly thin.
Earlier this week we reported on how the Volkswagen ID R completed its bonkers 6m 05s lap of the Green Hell at an energy usage equivalent of 17mpg; about the same as what an M3 will give you on a quick blast to and from the shops. The more you think about it, the more amazing it becomes.
For a car as rampantly quick as the ID R to make a circuit of such a fuel-hungry track using so relatively little energy is a brutal uppercut to the jaw of internal combustion. All of a sudden we’re reaching a technological event horizon whereby electric power can give more real-world speed, with better refinement, in a way that’s (on the face of it) much kinder to the planet. Not just that, though: the key buzzword of the 2010s has been efficiency, and in that respect the ID R represents a quantum leap.
Let’s take a flight of fancy: imagine owning a car that would hit 62mph in around 5.5 seconds, carry you to work in near-silent comfort, be kinder to the planet and achieve a financial equivalent of 100mpg or more. Now realise that the Tesla Model 3 already offers that. Such a combination is going to be prohibitively expensive for most of us for the time being, but when the classifieds start to fill up with BEVs in a few years… well, could you really resist?
No manufacturer has yet come up with a solution to the noise issue; or lack thereof. Formula E still sounds about as exciting as a wholemeal loaf, and to anyone for whom emotive noise is an integral part of the way they enjoy cars, it’s still a gaping hole in the new kids’ arsenals. But prices are creeping down, and now that BEVs can offer so much of everything else, for how long can we realistically clutch at that one remaining straw?
Comments
Rowing my gears. Until someone duplicates it in an electric car, which rationally would be phenomenally stupid, I’m not buying one.
There is sound but there are also gears
EVs will never have a manual gearbox and even the automatics they have won’t have more than 2-3 gears
And shifting gears is half of the fun of driving
I love ICE but I’m also a realist. The infrastrcture for EVs isn’t there yet but is rapidly developing. Infrastructure can only support one or the other, once we reach the tipping point we’ll have short, painful, transition from one to the other. After that all ICE cars will be about as useful as and old cathode-ray tube tv or film camera, yes you can still use them but with no network of petrol stations, parts supply drying up and restrictions on usage due to them being analog, not connected, why would you? It will be events like Goodwood FOS (probably called Festival of Noise by then) that will be the only time people get to see and hear ICE in action
A petrol engine has thermal efficiency of around 30%, so it will never come close to EVs energy consumption. If the energy in batteries come from fossil fuels, the environmental impact won’t be that different.
In most powerplant the thermal efficiency is above 60% : it’s really not hard to halve co² emissions just by switching to EV
Sure, i wanna see them win le mans with an electric only, LOL
Those “classifieds” full of presumably second hand EVs that you are touting, will undoubtedly look cheap until you find that they all need the batteries replaced at well over the cost of the car itself.
Sound is not all. Also the tuning of an engine.
Weight and sound. Although sooner or later that will be addressed and when it is, I’ll be totally on board.
As long as EVs don’t simulate the imperfections of Petrol engines I’m not interested, instat torque bores me, i find it much more exciting to watch the revs build and feel the car going faster and faster as the revs build up… And i drive a 77hp Golf….
Range. EVs don’t have much range compared to ICEs when driven in real world conditions. EVa are mostly around town grocery getting vehicles.