Depending on who you speak to, Elon Musk, the founder and CEO of Tesla, is either a visionary single-handedly dragging a moribund auto industry into the future of transportation, or a jackass of the first degree, a snake-oil salesman with a penchant for spending other people’s money. The pro-Musk and anti-Musk camps go after each other with gusto; nothing screams “Cripple Fight!” quite like the commentary on the merits of the latest electric vehicle news or contraption. These arguments (mostly savage, ad hominem abuse made possible by the anonymity of the Interwebbos), miss the central point. When electric vehicles rule the road, which they will once taxpayers pay for the infrastructure and government regulates the internal combustion engine out of existence, the music will die. The hills won’t be alive with the sound of shit.
The Electric Age, my friends, is the death of aural expression.
All the unique symphonic masterpieces of the internal combustion engine will be replaced with the electric whine--the same sound made by a charging portable battery, an electric toothbrush, and the Utmi Upgraded Silicone 10 Speed G Spot Vagina and Clitoris Vibrating Vibrator, the #1 best seller in Vibrators on Amazon.com (in-stock, ladies and gents, discreet packaging and Prime eligible). In the future, we all go “whirrrrrrr” together.
For the vast majority of the public who find driving a chore to be endured and consider cars as nothing more than appliances, the dawning of the Electric Age is cause to rejoice. No more paying for fuel! No more paying attention to the road! An extra hour plus a day to curate your social media footprint! The 2027 Chevrolet-Wunjian Joint Heavy Industries Galactos Autonomizer will drive for you, offering you “unparalleled relaxation as a sophisticated suite of software performs millions of calculations per second, allowing you the freedom to get ready for a day of work or unwind after a long day with our exclusive pampering suite, including Shenzhen total massager, aromatherapy, and LSD micro dosing through our patented DermaCaress fabric. The Autonomizer-Letting You Be the Real You.”
Urban dwellers should be especially excited about the advent of the New Whiner era, as it will significantly lower the noise floor in urban areas, where driving is a miserable, grinding back-alley slugfest. Steady, constant noise, the aural assault of urbanity, the relentless decibels of sound layer atop of sound layer, like stacked plates of white noise made solid through sheer sonic pressure and repetition, will abate; blood pressures will drop, heartbeats will slow, hell-maybe city folk will even stop walking so goddamn fast. We could all be flaneurs and tip our caps to each other as we whistle a jaunty tune as we stroll with style at a casual, unhurried pace.
Make no mistake, the coming age of silence will be sold to you as the Golden Key to personal freedom, made possible by the magic spell of luxury that manufacturers say you so rightfully deserve. Luxury has increasingly meant isolation from others, a protective cocoon of private space, and isolation from the machine, software suites buffering the interface between human and object. The 1989 Lexus LS400, a vehicle that matched or exceeded the flagship Mercedes S-class at half of the price, began the downward push of this idea to the lower levels of the market. Twenty years ago base models came off the line with crank windows, a tape deck, and upholstery lifted straight from the carpet of a regional airport in Oklahoma; in the current market space manufacturers fall over each other offering the latest gadgets-Bluetooth, backup cameras, lane change warning, blind spot monitoring, parallel parking--in even the cheapest of their offerings. Consumers that view cars as appliances demand these gadgets. They want to check their email and suckle at the teat of social media; driving is a hindrance to stalking an ex-girlfriend’s trip with her new boyfriend (the asshole at the bike shop with the Pearl Jam tattoo, really?) to Lake Tahoe, a hindrance from watching the casual sadism of Facebook videos, an unwelcome pause in the blossoming of our evils (fraudulence, cruelty, iron judgment) on social media.
For the rest of us who enjoy driving, it’s curtains. The punch-drunk piston chorus of a large displacement v8 with scads of overlap? Gone. The sweet six and the angry four? Gone, baby, gone. All these beautiful songs, soon to be lost forever. I’ll be an old man accosting kids to tell them stories of sounds they’ve never heard. These kids will pause their retinal interfaces with Skynet long enough to talk shit about me in Mandarin, kick me in my dangling old-man nuts and then pull my prints with a portable scanner to rob me blind. I’ll lie there in my own blood and piss, smiling, remembering the field down the straight at Irwindale as the green flag comes out, noise shattering the air into broken glass, promise and possibility almost visible through the hazy, carbon-soaked sky.