The Quest For An Electric-Car “Sound”
Should it mimic the roaring of a gasoline engine? Or the whoosh of a transporter from Blade Runner?
Last month, I wrote about the psychological effects of “the end of burning”.
Basically, I was thinking about the resistance to renewable energy, and wondering if some part of it is because solar and wind generate power without burning anything. That’s a big change! For thousands of years, humanity got its power from burning wood, then coal and gas. We learned to associate fire with power.
So maybe there’s something that’s faintly suspicious, or existentially “off”, about power that comes without burning something?
Americans … have a lot of romance about combustion. Car-owners coo over the roar of a powerful engine; I find the thrum of a motorcyle kind of badass. Fire, burning, and combustion are tied up inextricably with many western ideas about power itself — and I mean “power” not in newtons and joules and kilowatt hours, but power as in “the agency to do things, and to go places”.
Indeed, I’ve long suspected that there are probably people who find electric cars unsetting and aesthetically unsatisfying because they don’t have an engine that roars. We’ve been culturally…
