Once you’ve gotten over the charging and pricing issues, the next problem most people have with electric cars is the way they sound. They argue that the hum of an electric vehicle motor is sterile or aren’t fans of synthesized engine notes that can be piped out of speakers built into the cars either. Now, Maserati is hoping to win people over with a new soundscape that it’s engineered for its own electric models.
Maserati unveiled its latest electric car last week when it threw the covers off the new GranCabrio Folgore. The EV has a triple motor setup that’s capable of propelling the convertible electric supercar up to a top speed of 180 mph. On the way up to that speed, the new car comes with a bespoke sound that Maserati says “establishes the link between the driver and the machine.”
“The sound experience in driving a Maserati is very much a foundation, it’s very important,” says Davide Danesin, head of Maserati engineering. “We did a huge development effort to develop the proper sound experience.”
This development process saw Maserati’s engineers analyze the electricity going through the inverter in Maserati’s electric models. This, Danesin says, gave the company’s engineers a good idea of how the car was performing at any given moment, whether it was accelerating, braking or just waiting at the lights.
“The link with the car needed to be very good, it needed to be really coherent with what the car is doing,” explains Danesin. “The current going to the inverter gives us the information about what the car is really doing. So we based our sound on the current going to the inverter.”
However, the sound played to the outside world wasn’t just an amplified electric motor noise, as Danesin says that this “electric sound is not very nice to hear” thanks to its high frequencies. So instead, the company looked to something a little more flamboyant for its sound: the screaming V8 found in cars like the Ghibli Trofoe.
“We extracted some characteristics from our V8 and basically defined the fingerprint of the Maserati sound,” says Danesin. “And we applied this fingerprint over the modulation of the inverter. We then generated a new sound, which is the Folgore sound of all our cars.”
The same auditory signature is played out across Maserati’s three electric models, which includes the GranCabrio Folgore, GranTurismo Folgore and Grecae Folgore. In each, the generated engine note is played out via up to 21 speakers sourced from Italian hi-fi brand Sonos Faber, with passengers in the car and those on the street outside treated to the synthesized sound.