For all the ink that’s been spilled about the forthcoming electric Ferrari over the years—The horror! The heresy!—we still know very little about it. The Maranello manufacturer revealed on Thursday that the car will have roughly 1,000 horsepower, a fake manual shifting mode, and four seats. Oh, and it’ll be called the Elletrica, which is Italian for, you guessed it, “Electric.” But maybe the most intriguing detail so far is that it won’t pretend to be an internal combustion car with fake engine noises piped into the cabin. Instead, it will amplify the whirr of the electric motors thanks to a sensor that picks up on the rear e-axle’s vibrations.
In this way, the Elletrica won’t have a digitally synthesized acceleration sound like you’ll find in other EVs, such as Hyundai’s Ioniq N models. If you want decidedly unserious spaceship noises, then don’t buy the car with the prancing horse on the hood (as if anyone is cross-shopping the two). And while you might expect the car to have a microphone wired inside the powertrain, it actually uses an accelerometer mounted inside the inverter casting.
Ferrari likens the system to an electric guitar, which is made louder by an amplifier rather than the instrument’s actual body. Whereas internal combustion engines make noise by sending vibrations into the air, Ferrari makes the point that EV sounds travel through vibrations in the metal. It’s the accelerometer’s job to pick up on those humming frequencies and play them into the cabin.
There won’t be a constant droning inside the cabin when cruising down the highway; that would cancel out the inherent EV benefit of a silent cabin when you want it. Instead, it’ll only kick in when the driver floors it or uses the, erm, “shift” paddles in manual mode. The idea is to create feedback or dialogue between the driver in the car—not an easy job when you swap the V12 or flat-plane crank V8 for an electric motor.
It’s unclear if Ferrari will project the sound to the outside world by way of electric speakers. If that’s the plan, it should probably be quieter than the Dodge Charger Daytona EV—it’s loud enough to get a ticket for excessive exhaust noise. No, really.
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