From the back seat, you might not have known it was an EV. “These are luxury items, an emotional purchase. So we wanted to make sure that we maintained this kind of emotional connection to the car. And sound, we felt was really important,” Page said. After benchmarking some competitors, Bentley decided to dig into its archive instead, “and we came back to the engines out of the Continental and Turbo; quite a heavy, low-revving, high-torque [engine],” he said.

The beat of a drum

Rather than sample one of its 6.75 L V8 engines, the way a games studio might when simulating a car, Bentley went for a more human touch.

“We chose to use artists, humans to recreate the pattern,” Page said. “So they play the firing order, the V8 on drums. … If you think about the actual mechanical engine itself, it is imperfect. It has tolerances in it. So it has natural variation in the idle beat. And the people we’ve used to do the drumming, they’re experts in the field, but again, they’re humans. So they have natural imperfections in the way they have gone through the percussion,” he said.

The effect is subtle but convincing from the inside of the car, and because it’s a Bentley, the sound is never loud or obnoxious. It can be heard outside the car, too, but Bentley hasn’t gone the route Dodge did, fitting a loud external speaker to the Charger EV. The sound is mapped to the amount of load on the powertrain “so that you get a really natural experience when you’re in a high load scenario, up a hill or in a dynamic situation where you get that visceral level of kind of engagement with the car,” Page said.