Thank Frankel it's Friday: Can electric cars be fun to drive?

Think about how we like our cars to be. I’m not talking about space, refinement or comfort because these qualities will undoubtedly be improved by electrified powertrains. But what about the sound of an engine, the pleasure of changing gear by stick or by paddle? And what about lightness, probably the single greatest determinant of driving pleasure? As we know, three of the most distinguishing characteristics of electric powertrains are that they are silent, don’t need transmissions and are very, very heavy.

Manufacturers could, of course, try to fake it, and you’d be amazed at how much of a car’s character is synthesized even today. Cars with electric power steering have artificial ‘feel’ written into their programming. And chances are that if you drive a reasonably sophisticated modern sporting car, the noise you hear is not just the chatter of valves, the thunder of the exhaust and the snarl of the induction, but also a sound carefully constructed in very sophisticated laboratories and brought to you courtesy of the car’s stereo.

So could you not do the same with electric cars? Indeed could the absence of any extant sound source actually be an opportunity for your car to sound any damn way you like? You could simply call up a menu from an app on your telephone and suddenly your electrified box would sound just like a V12 Matra, or any other car that has ever made a sound worth listening to. If we are so willing to suspend disbelief every time we watch television or play a game online, why not when we drive our cars?

You could, I am sure, put artificial steps in an electric motor’s power delivery too, to mimic the effect of a gearbox. Car manufacturers already do exactly this in cars equipped with gear-less continuously variable transmissions, and Ferrari are world leading experts at mapping torque curves to entirely artificially manage the way a powertrain feels: in the 488GTB the engine has different mapping in every gear to make it feel more like a normally aspirated unit than the turbo motor it actually is. So would creating a virtual transmission not simply be an extension of a principle already in play?

As for weight, well I hear different things about that. Clearly, we’re never going to get lightweight electric cars powered by lithium-ion batteries, but solid state batteries certainly appear to provide that possibility. Not only are they cheaper to make, far faster to charge and don’t catch fire, they offer double the energy density of lithium-ion, which means they can be half the size for the same range. Problem is that when you try to find out when they’re likely to arrive, you get different answers: Toyota and Dyson which are both actively committed to solid state batteries talk about 2020, others 2030 and beyond.

I know my job is to provide answers and all I seem to have done is ask questions in this column, but the fact is that people far cleverer, better informed and resourced than me can’t answer them either, so what’s left is gut feeling. And my gut feeling is that the world will find a way to make electric cars fun to drive because, ultimately, the market for such devices is too big to pass up. And my guess is that we will accept that this entertainment will be artificially created and no longer a natural byproduct. We are moving into an age where people live their lives increasingly in the virtual world, not just in the games they play, but fundamentally in the way they communicate with each other. So it’s not such a leap to imagine driving going the same way. I don’t much like the idea of simulated driving pleasure but right now can see no alternative. The only bright side I can see is that this should do the values of our beloved classic cars that need no fakery to be fun absolutely no harm at all.