For an ultra-luxury brand like Bentley, electric seems perfect. The company builds impressively quiet and smooth gas engines, but they can’t even begin to compare with an EV for giving customers a silent and serene luxury experience. It turns out that even Bentley wants its EVs to have fake noises, and it is reaching back to some of its vintage engines for inspiration.
That’s not weird, by any means. However, the way Bentley is looking to create the sound for its new Torcal most decidedly is a little strange. And we suspect the end result will be just as odd as the method Bentley is taking to get there.
Bentley Breaks Out The Band
Bentley Torcal SoundBentley
It’s easy to see Bentley as a luxury brand like Rolls-Royce, but it sees itself as a more sporting brand with a long history of racing cars and engines. That includes gigantic supercharged four and six-cylinder units in the 1920s and ’30s, the 6 and 3/4-liter V8, and its latest W12 engine.
Bentley’s sound team took one of those V8 engines and recorded its sounds. No big deal, right? Then they took the recordings to a lab and started doing some strange experiments, like playing the V8 on one side of a room and a live drummer on the other, both through parabolic speakers. Yes… a live drummer.
Then they walked between the two and discovered something that Alex Van Halen had known for decades: the best engine sounds are about the percussion. The right cadences, imperfections, and fluctuations can make the engine sound almost human.
From that, Bentley engineers set out to design the sound of Torcal. Bentley Dynamic Symphony is what the automaker calls it, and the sounds were created using real instruments and real musicians. Bentley didn’t say who was playing those instruments, like Lincoln’s Detroit Symphony Orchestra, or name drop composers, like BMW’s Hans Zimmer, but the company’s session musicians were probably at the same level.
The New Sound Will Be Confusing, But Fancy
Bentley Torcal SoundBentley
Bentley says the sound “echoes the character and presence” of the 6.75-liter V8 it used for decades. It also says that the sound “is not designed to replicate an engine,” leaving us more than a little confused. The company wants to give you the feeling of an engine without sounding like an engine, and it wants the sounds to be loud. Yeah… okay, then.
The car company released a video showcasing the process, but we don’t believe the soundtrack is the one for the new SUV. If it is, Bentley should consider a trip back to the studio.
We’ll finally get to hear it on September 23, when Bentley reveals the Torcal EV that has been awaited – if not eagerly – since the model was confirmed two years ago.
CarBuzz Insight – Why This Matters:
Bentley electric SUV spy photoCarBuzz/Valnet
Bentley is a performance brand and, like it or not, performance today means sound. It’s not a surprise that the company is going all-out to make its first EV sound “good” though what makes “good” is extremely subjective.
The company has probably spent a great deal of cash developing its new sound. The first reviewers and buyers will almost certainly immediately turn it off, with the only actual noise then being the low-speed pedestrian warnings. Hopefully it has put as much thought into those as this greater soundtrack.
