About EV·ENGINE

EV·ENGINE gives an electric car the noise of a combustion one, using nothing but the speed a browser will hand any web page. It costs nothing, needs no account, and runs offline once loaded. It is built and maintained by Disrex, a development studio in Almelo, the Netherlands.

It is built and maintained by Disrex, a development studio in Almelo, the Netherlands.

Why it exists

An electric car is quiet, which is the point of it and also, on the right road, the dull part. The aftermarket answers all meant hardware: a box wired into the car, or a dongle in the OBD port. A browser already knows how fast it is moving, and that turned out to be enough to build an engine on.

What it is

A web page. Twenty machines, from a 1.0 three-cylinder to a V12, plus five that are not cars at all. Three play recordings and the rest are synthesised live, sample by sample, in the browser. It costs nothing, needs no account, and runs offline once loaded: every font, script and sound is served from ev-engine.com. See how it works for the mechanism.

How it is built

TypeScript, no framework. The synthesis runs in an AudioWorklet so the audio thread never waits on the main thread, and the site is static: no server does anything at request time beyond counting an event. The numbers behind the sound are measured rather than guessed. All twenty machines were level-matched offline using ITU-R BS.1770 weighting, so changing engine does not change how loud the car is.

What it is not

It is not a driving aid. It does not connect to the car, read the car’s systems, or know anything the browser has not told it. The speed it displays comes from GPS and lags the car’s own speedometer, so it is the wrong thing to steer by.