Journal · Sonic branding

Sonic branding for automotive brands: what should a car brand sound like?

Sonic branding for an automotive brand is the deliberate design of every sound a car brand makes: the sound the vehicle itself emits, the chimes and cues inside the cabin, the sound of the showroom and brand space, and the music in its films and campaigns - built so that all four are recognisably one brand. For a century the engine did most of that work for free. An electric drivetrain removed it, and with it the default sound identity car brands never had to think about. This article maps where an automotive brand actually makes sound, who designs each layer, what the regulation requires and what it leaves open - from a composer who has scored inside a car brand's building, though not, to be precise, inside its cars.

Why electric changed the question

For internal combustion, the sound was the brand whether anyone designed it or not: a flat-six, a V8, a small turbocharged four - each announced its maker before the badge came into view. Manufacturers spent decades tuning intake and exhaust notes precisely because customers bought them with their ears. An electric motor produces almost nothing audible at low speed, so the vehicle's most emotional sound - the one that carried the brand for a hundred years - simply vanished. Two things followed. Regulators required electric cars to make a sound for safety. And brands discovered that, for the first time, they could decide what their cars sound like from a blank page. Most have treated that as an engineering problem. It is at least half a branding problem, which is why film composers keep turning up in car companies' press releases.

AVAS is a safety rule, not a brand strategy

The regulation is worth stating plainly, because it is often confused with sonic branding and is not. In the EU, Regulation 540/2014 requires every new electric and hybrid vehicle to carry an Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System: a continuous sound whenever the car moves at up to 20 km/h or reverses, at least 56 decibels and no more than 75, with the technical specification taken from UN Regulation 138. It applied to new vehicle types from July 2019 and to all new vehicles from July 2021. The United States has an equivalent, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard 141, which requires sound while stationary, reversing and in forward motion up to 30 km/h, with full compliance from September 2020. Both exist for one reason: pedestrians, and particularly blind and visually impaired pedestrians, need to hear a car coming.

AVAS defines the floor - when the car must make a sound and how loud. It says almost nothing about what that sound should be, beyond requiring that it change with speed. That gap is where branding lives. A brand can meet the rule with a generic tone from a supplier's catalogue, or it can treat the mandatory sound as the most-heard sonic asset it will ever own: a sound every pedestrian within twenty metres hears, thousands of times a day, in every city it sells in. The difference between those two choices is not an engineering decision. It is the same decision a brand makes about its logo.

The four layers of automotive sound, and who owns each

The confusion around car-brand sound comes from treating four different jobs as one. They are not, and different people do them.

The first two layers are engineering-led with a musical brief; the last two are music-led with an engineering brief. The mistake most brands make is letting one supplier claim all four, or letting the four run with no shared musical idea at all: a launch film in one key, a start-up chime in another, and a showroom playing whatever the streaming service suggested. The brand that wins is the one whose four layers audibly belong to each other, and the way to get there is a single musical identity, written first, that each layer is then derived from.

Who has actually done it

The examples are recent and instructive, because each brand answered the question differently. BMW hired Hans Zimmer, working with its own creative director for sound, Renzo Vitale, to compose the drive sounds for its electric range under the name IconicSounds Electric - first in the i4 and iX in 2021, with a distinct, more aggressive signature for electric M models and sounds that change with the driving mode. That is the film-composer answer: treat the car as a score. Mercedes built its EQ sound in an acoustic laboratory as an interactive system that responds to accelerator position, speed and recuperation, and offers EQS drivers selectable soundscapes rather than one fixed voice - the engineering answer, with the customer as co-author. Rivian worked with the sound-design studio Audio UX to derive its interface and alert sounds from nature recordings, reportedly narrowing around 900 candidate sounds to about forty for production, so that an outdoor-adventure brand sounds like the outdoors - the brand-strategy answer, where every cue is an argument for the positioning. GM's electric HUMMER took the opposite road: a dynamic, distorted, guitar-like drive sound that keeps the brand's aggression alive without a combustion engine. Four brands, four philosophies, and one shared lesson: none of them left it to the AVAS supplier's default.

What a brand space sounds like

The layer I know from the inside is the room. Fanal is a fifteen-minute piece I wrote for an exhibition at NIO House Amsterdam, the European flagship of the electric-vehicle maker NIO - a gallery floor inside a car brand's building. I did not design NIO's vehicle sounds, and it matters to say so: the vehicle layer is engineering-led and I was nowhere near it. What I was asked to do was make a space inside a car brand feel like the brand, fifteen minutes at a time, for people who were not there to buy a car. That is a different brief from an advert. A film has an edit to follow; a room has no edit, only people arriving and leaving on their own clock, so the music has to hold its identity from any entry point. It is the same problem hotel lobbies face in sonic branding in hospitality, and the reason a showroom is closer to sonic branding in retail than to a commercial. Scoring for a room teaches a discipline campaigns do not: restraint, long forms, and a signature that survives being heard in fragments. It is also the layer where a car brand can be most distinctive for the least money, because almost nobody is doing it with intent.

Does any of it work?

The evidence base for sonic branding is now decent, and automotive is one of the categories it was measured in. A 2023 study by Audacy and the audio-research firm Veritonic, analysing 113 ads across entertainment, automotive, consumer goods and financial services, found that ads carrying a sonic brand lifted recall by 17 percent on radio and 14 percent in podcasts. Mastercard's research with GfK found that within twelve months of launching its sonic identity, 77 percent of consumers said the sound made the brand feel more trustworthy. For the academic backstop, Charles Spence's 2024 narrative review in Psychology & Marketing gathers the experimental literature on how sound shapes brand perception. None of these numbers are about a specific car brand's drive sound. What they show is that consistent, owned sound moves recall and trust - which is precisely the case for building the four layers from one idea rather than sourcing them separately.

How an automotive sonic identity actually gets built

The sequence is the same as any sonic identity, with two automotive-specific differences. First, the audit: what does the brand already sound like across all four layers, what does the category sound like, and what is unclaimed. Then the core musical idea - a motif, a harmonic character, a palette of timbres - written as music, not as a specification, because engineers can derive a drive sound from a theme far more easily than composers can derive a theme from a spectrogram. Then derivation into each layer: the theme becomes the sonic logo for film, the motif becomes the start-up chime, the harmonic character becomes the basis for the drive sound the acoustics team shapes to speed and load, and the palette becomes the brand space.

The first automotive difference is timeline: vehicle sound is locked years before launch, so the composer enters at concept, not at campaign. The second is validation: exterior and cabin sounds are tested for legibility, fatigue and safety in ways a brand film never is, and the musical idea has to survive that testing without losing its identity. The process from brief to delivery is otherwise the one described in the sonic branding service overview, and the pricing logic is the one in what does sonic branding cost: scoped to touchpoints, with the vehicle layer priced by the engineering partner and the musical layers by the composer. Who owns the result is its own question, answered in who owns the music.

Common mistakes

Four recur. Borrowing combustion nostalgia: a synthesised V8 in an electric car tells the customer the brand misses the past, which is not the message most electric brands are paying for. A sonic logo with no system under it: a three-note sting at the end of every film that has nothing to do with what the car or the showroom sounds like. Letting the supplier default become the brand's most-heard sound, by omission, because nobody in marketing knew the AVAS decision was being made. And licensing library music for a flagship space - the one place where a brand has total control of the environment, handed to a track four thousand other companies can license this afternoon, a trade-off custom music vs library music sets out in full. The same four-layer map applies to the other sport that engineers one of its own sounds, in sonic branding for golf brands.

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