DESIGN INTELLIGENCEJune 15, 2026·Mary · DEPIX Design Intelligence

The Grille You Can Hear

When the engine goes silent, the sound a car makes stops being a by-product of combustion and becomes a designed object — authored on purpose, signed by a named composer, and carrying the same brand-recognition load the grille once did. The studio that treats acoustic signature as styling, not compliance, owns a channel the eye never reaches.

The day the sound became a decision

For a century, a car's voice was an accident. The note a V8 made at 4,000 rpm was the residue of displacement, firing order, and exhaust geometry — engineers tuned it, marketers romanticised it, but nobody composed it. It fell out of the machine.

Take the combustion engine away and that residue disappears. The drivetrain goes effectively silent. And into that silence steps a question no design studio had ever been forced to answer from a blank page: what should this brand sound like when there is nothing left to record?

That is the inflection. The sound is no longer discovered — it is decided. And the moment something is decided rather than discovered, it belongs to design.

The clearest evidence that the industry understood this is who they hired. BMW did not hand the brief to an exhaust-tuning vendor. On 24 June 2019, BMW Group announced it was working with Academy Award-winning film composer Hans Zimmer and Renzo Vitale, the company's Creative Director Sound, on the acoustic identity of its electric future (BMW Group PressClub, 24 June 2019). Vitale's framing was not acoustic engineering — it was art direction: "We envision sounds that celebrate the beauty and complexity of our vehicles and that are able to move people."

You do not commission a film composer to satisfy a regulation. You commission one because you have decided the sound is part of the brand's face.

The floor is compliance; the brand is everything above it

There is a regulatory floor here, and it matters — but it is a floor, not the building.

Because EVs are near-silent at low speed, they are dangerous to pedestrians, the blind, and cyclists who rely on engine noise to locate an approaching car. UNECE Regulation No. 138 mandates an Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System (AVAS) on electric and hybrid vehicles. The system must emit a continuous sound at low speed, with a minimum of 56 dB(A) and a maximum of 75 dB(A) at 20 km/h, and the sound must change with vehicle behaviour — varying in level or character in synchronisation with speed (THOR AVAS / UNECE R138 summary; European Blind Union AVAS Q&A). In the EU, AVAS became mandatory on all new electric and hybrid type-approvals from July 2021.

The rule is alive, not frozen. An informal working group met ten times between May 2022 and September 2023, and the resulting 02 series of amendments to UN R138 came into force on 10 January 2025, tightening test procedures and the defined speeds — forward and reverse — at which the system must speak (InterRegs / UNECE update).

Here is the strategic point. The regulation specifies a decibel envelope and a behaviour. It says nothing about character. Inside that envelope sits an enormous, unregulated design space — timbre, motif, how the sound morphs under acceleration, what emotion it cues. Compliance gets you to 56 dB(A). It does not tell you whether those decibels sound like a luxury liner, a fighter jet, or a synthesiser pad. The compliance floor is identical for every brand. Everything that distinguishes one brand from another lives in the space the law leaves blank. The studio that fills that space deliberately owns a differentiator; the one that treats it as a checkbox ships a generic warning tone with its badge on it.

Sound as styling, said out loud

The decisive language is not ours — it is the industry's own, and it has hardened over the last two years.

When BMW extended the work to its performance arm on 11 May 2021, the quotes stopped sounding like safety engineering entirely. Hans Zimmer: "Every BMW has its own character, which is reflected in the sound it makes. So for the electrically driven BMW M models we have developed a driving sound which accentuates their emotional driving experience particularly vividly." Renzo Vitale: "When you press the pedal of an M car, you suddenly get goosebumps all over your body. We translated this feeling into a drive sound that expresses a fusion of superior power and flowing energy" (BMW Group PressClub, 11 May 2021).

Read those again as a design brief. "Character." "Translated this feeling into a drive sound." That is not acoustics describing a waveform — that is a designer describing a styling intent and then executing it in a medium that happens to be audible instead of visible. The grille communicates "this is an M car" to the eye in a tenth of a second. The IconicSounds Electric motif now does the same job for the ear. Same brief, different sense.

Three OEMs, three composers, one direction of travel

This is not a single brand's affectation. The pattern is industry-wide, and the field itself now names it precisely.

A supplier-side post surfaced via our LinkedIn monitoring (KEPO, an AVAS integration firm, posted roughly three weeks before this report) states the thesis almost word for word: "AVAS is evolving from a compliance component into a brand asset… The responsibility for sound design is moving from the compliance layer to the product-definition layer." The post catalogues three independent programmes: BMW commissioned Hans Zimmer for the i4, iX, and i7; Volkswagen brought in producer Leslie Mandoki to craft a unified acoustic signature for the ID. family; Nissan built an acoustic identity called "Canto" for the LEAF, Ariya, and its broader EV lineup. The conclusion: "make every EV sound like its own brand" (KEPO, LinkedIn, ~May 2026).

The roster is longer than three. Porsche has had a dedicated "Sound and Concepts" team developing the Taycan's acoustics since 2015 and sells Porsche Electric Sport Sound as an option (Porsche Newsroom). Jaguar spent four years developing the I-PACE's alert sound, shelving an early "spaceship" concept after test subjects looked at the sky instead of the road, and tuned the result with the UK charity Guide Dogs for the Blind (Motoring Research, 2018). Three different collaboration models — celebrity composer, in-house team, charity-validated brief — and one consistent direction: the sound is being pulled upstream into product definition.

When competitors who agree on nothing else all independently decide the same thing is worth a named author's time, that is not fashion. That is a category forming.

The interior is the next blank page

The exterior AVAS sound is the regulated, audible-to-others channel. But the most aggressive move so far points inward — and it reframes the whole opportunity.

At CES 2024 (9 January 2024), Mercedes-Benz announced MBUX Sound Drive, developed with will.i.am. It turns driving inputs into musical expression: the system reacts to braking, acceleration, steering, and energy recuperation, layering elements as speed builds — from a bass line at idle to fuller melody, harmony, and vocals at speed (Motor1, 9 January 2024). will.i.am called it "the most significant change to how people appreciate music in their cars."

Strip the celebrity and look at the mechanism. The car is no longer playing a fixed signature; it is generating sound in real time as a function of how you drive. The acoustic identity becomes interactive — a system, not a clip. That is a far harder design problem than authoring one motif, and it is exactly the kind of problem that rewards a studio thinking about sound as a designed, responsive object rather than a compliance asset bolted on at the end.

What this means for a design-led studio

The lesson generalises well past sound, and it is the reason this sits inside Design Intelligence rather than automotive trivia.

Whenever a constraint is removed, a design decision is created — and most organisations don't notice it's theirs to make. The engine went away and took the sound with it. Ninety percent of the industry's reflex was to treat the gap as a compliance line item: hit 56 dB(A), ship a generic tone, move on. A minority treated the same gap as a styling surface with a brand-recognition payload, hired an author for it, and now owns a sensory channel the eye literally cannot reach. The grille is contested ground; the sound was, for a moment, empty ground. The brands that moved early are claiming it.

The decision in front of every studio is the same shape: where has a removed constraint quietly handed you a blank page, and are you treating it as a checkbox or as a styling surface? The answer is rarely obvious, because the blank page doesn't announce itself — it shows up disguised as a regulation to satisfy. The discipline is catching the decision before it defaults to the floor.

That catching — surfacing the design decision hidden inside a constraint, and pushing it up to the level where character is chosen rather than inherited — is precisely the work. The decibels are the evidence. The decision is the product.

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