The Sound Is Designed Too: What Silent EVs Reveal About the Surface Everyone Forgets

For a hundred years, a product's sound was an accident. The roar of an engine, the clack of a shutter, the clatter of a keyboard — none of it was designed. It was the audible exhaust of a mechanism doing its job, and we learned to love it anyway. Then two things happened at once: products went electric, and products went digital. The mechanism fell silent — and the sound it used to make became a blank space that somebody now has to fill on purpose.

That is the quiet revolution behind BMW's decision to hire the film composer Hans Zimmer. An electric BMW makes almost no noise, so its sound is no longer inherited from an engine; it has to be composed. Zimmer's team built BMW IconicSounds Electric, using Shepard tones — an audio illusion of a pitch that seems to rise forever — to give a silent car an emotional acoustic identity it could never have produced mechanically, with a distinct aural character reserved for its M performance models. The sound of the car is now a design object, authored the way its grille or its stance is authored.

It is not just BMW, and it is not just prestige. Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems are now legally mandatory in most major markets: a silent EV must, by law, make a sound below certain speeds so pedestrians can hear it. Overnight, every carmaker was handed a blank sonic canvas and a legal obligation to fill it — and the smart ones realised the safety requirement was also the most direct expression of what the brand stands for. Rivian built its alert sound from natural recordings, aiming for calm rather than menace; the choice says as much about the brand as any surface you can see, and it has made automotive sound a discipline in its own right.

Here is the contrarian part. The obvious instinct is to make a silent car sound like "the future" — spaceship whooshes, synthetic drama. But research keeps finding that drivers and pedestrians don't actually want maximal novelty; they need sounds they can recognise and trust. The best sonic design is not the most futuristic. It is the most coherent — sound that matches the brand's existing identity the way a good typeface matches a logo. That reframes the whole exercise: the question was never "what sounds cool," it is "what does this brand sound like" — an identity question, not an audio-engineering one.

Which is exactly why it belongs in the concept phase, and exactly why most teams get it wrong. Sound is still, overwhelmingly, treated as an afterthought — bolted on near the end, a generic beep chosen from a library once the "real" design is finished. But a sonic identity is as strategic as a visual one; signature sounds trigger brand recognition worth billions, the audible equivalent of a logo. You cannot retrofit that. The Netflix "ta-dum," the Intel chime, the specific character of a camera shutter that no longer needs to exist — these work because someone decided, early and deliberately, that the product would sound like itself.

And the stakes are rising, not falling. Sound design in 2026 is no longer optional: voice interfaces, connected cars, wearables and AR mean more of our interactions happen without looking at a screen at all. In an eyes-busy world the ear does more of the identity work — you know your phone, your car, your apps by sound before you glance at them. A product that hasn't decided what it sounds like is leaving one of its most powerful identity surfaces to chance.

The lesson generalises past cars and chimes. Every product has surfaces its makers don't think of as "design" — the sound it makes, the way it feels in the hand, the rhythm of how it responds — and each is either authored on purpose at the concept phase or inherited by accident. The silencing of the machine simply made one of those hidden surfaces impossible to ignore: when the engine stops roaring, the silence is so loud that someone finally has to design it.

Deciding what a thing should sound like — treating an invisible surface with the same rigour as a visible one — is the same discipline as deciding what it should look like. Both are concept-phase decisions about identity, and both reward the teams who make them early and on purpose. That is the part of design intelligence we care about most at Depix.

Sources:

• ●BMW Group — Hans Zimmer and BMW Group work together on sound design for electric mobility
• ●BMW Group — New soundscapes for electric driving: BMW IconicSounds Electric
• ●BMW Magazine — Hans Zimmer: individual drive sounds as identity for electric vehicles
• ●InsideEVs — The sound Hans Zimmer created for electric BMW M cars
• ●Impulse Audio Lab — AVAS Sound Design (Acoustic Vehicle Alerting Systems)
• ●Audio UX — Rivian Sonic Branding for Electric Vehicles
• ●Sonic Minds — Sound Design in the Automotive Industry
• ●Fortune — Electric vehicles don't need to sound like the future
• ●TechBrew — Study suggests automakers might not want to get too creative with EV sounds
• ●Lippincott — The future of sonic branding: a conversation with Audio UX
• ●Shah Mohammed — Sonic Branding: how signature sounds trigger billion-dollar brand recognition
• ●Soundverse — AI Music for Brand Identity: how sonic branding evolves in 2026