Car News Articles

Everything automotive is about to go electric.

How do we know? People keep telling us. And, generally speaking, the less these people know about the subject, the more certain they are.

So great is the excitement that electric car companies are popping up all over the globe. There are even plans to revive the Trabant brand-name and body style – if style is the right word – as a purely electric vehicle.

Those looking for a slightly more restrained view of a future in which sparks are the new petrol, might consider Norbert Reithofer’s recent comments.

The managing director of BMW said electric vehicles will remain expensive and limited in range, helping to ensure the year 2020 ‘will see between 5 and 15 per cent electric vehicles – no more.’

Others have mentioned concern about how much CO2 will be produced if coal-fired power stations have to keep up with vast new demands on domestic power-plugs.

However, unless the sight of a brand new Trabant stops the whole battery car movement in its tracks, electric vehicles are definitely coming.

Audi recently demonstrated the e-tron, a concept sports car that suggests you won’t have to give up performance. With a separate electric motor to drive each wheel, the e-tron supposedly develops 230 kW and a positively truck-like 4500 Nm of torque.

It looks the part too. But could there be any romance in owning one? Could a machine powered by the high-tech equivalent of a phalanx of Triple As ever deliver the sounds, the smells, the tactile experience of classic motoring?

Even if the e-tron is quick, driving it will be like watching an action movie with the sound turned off. The earth won’t shake, the explosions will be merely flashes of interesting light. Won’t they?

There’s a podcast known as the Slate Culture Gabfest, where a bunch of over-educated New York-types talk at about 100 mph and sound like they’ve just inhaled helium. One of their number, Stephen Metcalf, recently remarked that: ‘a Bruce Springsteen song could not take place in a Prius.’

He was absolutely right. No one wants to go riding through mansions of glory in a CO2-reducing machine. Sure, a cleaner world might be a bit hard to arrange if we all had Bruce’s ‘69 Chevy with a 396, Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor.’ But there must be a way of hanging on to a bit of our automotive heritage.

If everything goes completely quiet we might soon have the car equivalent of young kids buying vinyl. They’ve realised that downloading a compressed and mid-range depleted song is a function, not an experience.

Motorists too want an experience. Think of all the burbles, roars, rumbles and hisses that we associate with performance. Electric power will produce, broadly speaking, none of them.

And spare a thought for the engineers who have spent decades modifying or mollifying the noise of conventional engines. Many of them could be facing a future of cold, sterile, silent electric motors.

Even legislators are worried what this means, though their concern is that pedestrians and the blind won’t hear these new cars and may be flattened.

Nissan has apparently been talking to film composers about creating a ‘soundtrack’ for electric vehicles.

According to Bloomberg, the Japanese company’s engineers have arrived at an artificially generated ‘engine noise’ influenced by the flying cars in Blade Runner. The feature may not be ready, however, in time for the launch of the electric Leaf model next year.

The same Bloomberg report said Datasystem Co is selling an Aus$161 ‘noisemaker’ for electric cars that can emit a cat’s meow, a human voice saying ‘Excuse Me’ and 14 other sounds.

I’d suggest the novelty of the Datasystem Co system would wear out in approximately 500 metres.

A high-compression Ferrari V12, however… that’s a sound to treasure for life, isn’t it?

Tony Davis