ooooIYKYK, ISSUE #oo21
I don’t want to say I just can’t let it go, but last week Jonny Lieberman and I revisited a debate we’d begun back in late 2023. At the time, the well-known Motor Trend staffer and Spike’s Car Radio host found himself clustered around a table not far from Willow Springs. He’d spent the day driving Ken Block’s S1 Hoonitron and I was slated to get a ride in that car with Le Mans winner Dindo Capello the very next day. As Audi Sport engineers and Capello sat there (hopefully) amused, Jonny and I mixed it up over the value of simulated gears in EVs.
Fast forward to this past week, and Jonny was on my ooooIYKYK Podcast, willing to revisit the debate. Lieberman also hosts Motor Trend’s podcast The Inevitable about the future of the automobile and dailies a Rivian R1T. Given the vast mix of cars he gets to sample, he’s easily an expert on what makes a driver’s car a driver’s car, much less what might make an EV more of a driver’s car. He’s also highly opinionated. And, for the record, his hot take is decidedely negative on simulated gears.
Interestingly, Ken Block wasn’t on the same page. Block’s longtime business partner, Gymkhana film director and well-known Audi enthusiast Brian Scotto once told me that for the second drift film they’d produced with the S1 Hoonitron (Electrikhana 2- Mexico City), Ken had convinced Audi engineers to put simulated gears into the car. While first filming with the Hoonitron in Vegas the year before, they’d learned a lot about the new potential of an electric drift car, but there’d been a lot of go-to tricks in Ken’s repertoire he just couldn’t do with the car’s first evolution. Adding in those simulated stepped gears brought a lot of those tricks back into play.
Jonny and I got into it a bit more, never really solving the unsolvable… because what makes a great driver’s car is effectively a matter of opinion. Simulated ratios make an EV slower and more complex from Jonny’s perspective, though also added in more capabilities for physical chassis control for Ken Block. It depends what you want in a car, but Ken’s preferences aren’t lost on me when I slide into the seat of my own driver’s car of choice.
Having a perspective more geared toward automotive performance in storytelling given his longtime Gymkhana director role, Brian Scotto had also shared other impressions of EVs. While the Hoonitron is plenty dramatic in its capability to shred tires, Brian admitted to me that he missed the other sensory inputs of ICE. The audible howl of an engine is one of those things EVs just don’t have. Exhausts visibly popping flames were another thing Brian mentioned.
So, can EVs make great driver’s cars? It sure seems like Audi and its corporate cousin Porsche aim to step up to the plate to answer that question with the 718 EV and the Audi sportscar with design revealed by Concept C. Still, if the car is to have the gruff bark of an Audi 5-cylinder engine or the stepped ratios preferred by Ken Block, then they’ll have to be synthesized.
There’s other news swirling around right now that all seems to intertwine with this discussion. Porsche announced there will be an ICE offering within the 718 line, which could mean a version of the chassis that underpins the Concept C road car would feature an internal combustion engine. Also, rumors of Audi’s 2.5 TFSI 5-cylinder engine getting fitted into a Volkswagen Golf R that could mean EU7 certification and an extension of relevance for the most Audi engine of all Audi engines (and the final Audi Sport-developed engine) could go longer than the expected 2026/2027 cut-off we’re currently expecting.
I don’t envy car manufacturers. The EU is coming in hot on a mandate to cease selling internal combustion cars, while at the same time car enthusiasts around the globe seem to be drawing a hard line against the complete ending of the ICE era.
You also can’t deny that what drives emotions is sensory inputs. Left to their own devices, brand marketing managers still lead with howling and dramatic internal combustion RS cars, even by divisions like Audi China promoting the brand’s performance driving experience despite that market’s rapid pace at EV adoption. In the meantime, the brand’s agency in the UK produced creative to support four rings placement on Sky Sports F1 with further internal combustion mechanical sensory inputs. For now and the foreseeable future at least, EVs are still missing something by this measure. And, synthesized sound and stepped ratios most likely aren’t going to get us there… at least not yet.
That begs the question, should some ICE remain? Jonny made a good point in the podcast, that he’s concerned about the environmental impact of our not embracing the EV more rapidly. However, he also had a point that not all great cars serve the same purpose. Maybe the answer can be found in that dichotomy. Let the appliance vehicles like the family crossover or workman’s pickup truck move to EV where that tech seems best suited for highway cruising or stop-and-go commuting. Allow for internal combustion driver’s cars to remain – automotive lifestyle products meant to stir the soul, but limited to a particular volume or percentage of sales as is currently the plan in Europe.
Do we really need such a binary decision to dictate something as massive as the entire car industry or the broad spectrum of automotive products? I’d argue no.
At Audi or the Volkswagen Group, that could mean cherry-picking a very few internal combustion engines to survive. I’m thinking 2.5 TFSI, and beyond that the Porsche-developed 2.9 TFSI or 4.0 TFSI. Centralize around a very few driver’s performance products – Concept C, RS 5, RS 6, and take the rest to EV.
It just seems like we can find a compromise here, one that pulls the greatest numbers of CO2 emitters from the roads while leaving the soul-stirrers to survive and thrive for those who see cars as more than a transportation appliance. Regardless of mandates, that model sure seems to be working at places like Ford where the Mustang stands alone as a lifestyle vehicle amidst a range of more purposeful vehicles in the range.
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