Cars are getting quieter and quieter. Many makers – Maserati, Porsche and Mercedes-Benz among them – are swapping frenzied and often frangible engines for batteries, and with it a new era of silence has arrived. Serene calmness, it seems, is the new luxury.
Last year Rolls-Royce became the latest marque to embrace electrification with the Spectre (from £330,000). It raised the bar high: the car glides forward with the muffled whoomphs of a soundproofed studio. As Torsten Müller-Ötvös, then Rolls-Royce CEO, put it at the car’s launch last year: “Electric propulsion fits extremely well [with] Rolls-Royce because it is silent [and] aids waftability.”
