Green Mile: To make an EV better, make it a little worse

EZRA DYER

We’re at an inflection point in electric-car optimism. Over the past few years, as electric vehicle sales increased substantially and car companies announced an onslaught of new battery-powered models, it seemed that electric cars were a near-term inevitability. But for all the heady promise, EV enthusiasm seems to be cooling.

Ford recently announced that it’s cutting production targets for the Lightning, its electric truck. Brag-and-bluster Tesla projected that sales growth in 2024 would be “notably lower” than in recent years. Hertz is selling off about a third of its electric cars and Audi is slowing its transition to EVs. There are plenty of obvious headwinds for EVs — cost, range, and charging infrastructure (or lack thereof). But there’s also a more subtle issue at play, one that won’t be easily resolved: Electric cars are too boring.

I know this seems like a preposterous complaint, and I agree. On the list of things wrong with the world, “electric cars are dull” isn’t in the Top 5. I revel in being able to charge my plug-in hybrid Chrysler Pacifica with my solar panels, and believe that EVs are the answer to humanity’s long-term transportation needs. However, I also believe that the anaesthetic experience of driving an electric car is a real hurdle to the technology’s widespread adoption, given that nearly every potential EV buyer grew up with the rich sensory experience of internal combustion.

Driving, as we all knew it before the arrival of mass-market electric cars a little more than a decade ago, involved familiar rituals that carved out a place in our collective psyche. You’d turn a key or push a button, feel a rumble of vibration through the seat and steering wheel, put a transmission in gear and listen to the revs rise and fall with upshifts and downshifts. Maybe you learned to drive with a manual transmission, with your feet dancing between clutch and accelerator as you chose your gears, herky-jerky at first but eventually tilling a furrow into muscle memory. There might be smells, oil and gas or diesel, not pleasant but not entirely unpleasant, either.

For people who love cars, and even those who don’t, this flood of visceral sensory feedback becomes associated with freedom and road trips, first dates and dashes to the grocery store. Electric cars make a clean break from all of that. Climb into an electric car, and there’s often no key to turn or start button to push — it’s just on. There’s little noise except for the legally required pedestrian warning tone, which often sounds like Trent Reznor composing a creepy-synth Nine Inch Nails tune somewhere behind the front bumper. Some of them have a “one pedal” mode that doesn’t even require touching the brake pedal most of the time. It’s like driving a sensory deprivation chamber. For passengers, it’s luxurious. For drivers, it’s dull.

Sure, some versions of the Lucid Air and Tesla Model S can hit 150 m.p.h. in less than 10 seconds, but that’s important the same way it’s important for watches to be waterproof to a depth of 1,000 feet — as a brag for tedious rich people. The Tesla Cybertruck, with its polygon-meme shape and stainless-steel skin, is essentially the world’s most visible riposte to the boring-EV problem. Squeeze the accelerator, though, and it behaves like every other electric car, which is to say quick and cold-hearted.

Powerful acceleration used to be a thrill in its own right, but EVs commodified and muffled that aspect of performance. A quick electric car is as common as a sunny day in Los Angeles, a pleasant base-line normal that’s mostly taken for granted.

Perhaps it’s true that many cars are generally boring regardless of how they’re powered, deliberately inoffensive in the name of mass appeal. And griping about sound and character might sound like the futile whining of a demographic raised on muscle cars and four-speed manuals — “OK Boomer” on wheels. But I’ve got some bad news for car companies hoping that the next generation will become EV-native.

My kids are 11 and 13 years old and they are manifestly unexcited about electric cars. When they play Forza on Xbox, I hear the shrieks of Lamborghinis and the roar of Ford Raptors emanating from the room. I test cars for a living, and the kids’ favorite car from the past few years was the Dodge Challenger Black Ghost, an 807-horsepower resource-pillager that represents the last gasp of supercharged V-8 thunder for Dodge. It’s a stupid car, really, peak mouth-breather, screaming of wretched excess. But its analog mechanical brutality activates some primal lobe deep in our brains, the one that catalyses noise into adrenaline. The final V-8 Challenger rolled off the line on Dec. 22 last year, another dinosaur obliterated by the EV asteroid. Car companies are trying to figure out how to recapture the distinctive personalities of cars like the Black Ghost in the EV era. Dodge envisions a booming speaker system for its future electric muscle cars, mimicking loud exhaust. BMW is going futuristic, with a soundtrack developed by Hans Zimmer — floor the accelerator, and the iX model fills with the noise of a synth-spaceship warp. Toyota is developing a manual transmission emulator for electric cars, to return some of the driving engagement. Or so we can hope.

Building a simulated manual transmission that’s not really connected to anything might sound a little bit pathetic, but I have reason to be optimistic, because I’ve seen how quickly technology can change. Twenty years ago, I went to Michelin’s alternative-fuel vehicle conference in Shanghai, and at that point nobody saw lithium batteries and electric cars on the horizon. Now we have electric pickup trucks that are as quick as a Corvette, and wind and solar power are the fastest growing and cheapest new means of producing electricity. The Biden administration aims to hasten EV adoption with new rules and tax incentives. And it seems logical that, after conquering their objective goals, car companies will turn to the subjective ones, the noises and nuances that make driving fun.

Look, all I want is an EV that sounds like a mountain lion keening at your bedroom window, the way a Porsche 911 GT3 does at full throttle. The GT3 — and many of our favorite cars — could easily be made much quieter. But Porsche understands that sometimes, to make a car better, you’ve got to make it a little worse.

The electric future is clean, smooth and refined. But we might get there sooner if we can figure out how to rough it up a little bit.