The Greatest Growls??

What are your personal favorite growls from these current-year performance motor cars?

I have not been behind the wheel of this caliber engines for very long, but I have a stereophile’s ear, and I can hear “details” in a crafted car’s pipes.

But I’ve also lived in poor parts of cities during the 1970s and 80s period when every street youth altered the “noise” of his muffler and lines to create the illusion: the result is what I used to call “ghetto-car noise” instead of the growl of professional makers’ cars.

The real car makers of these vehicles always manage to make their growls sound serious and not really bragging, like a power that is slightly suppressed because “it MUST be suppressed---if we open her full, the ship just won’t take it, Captain”.

Modern BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Tesla, Ford Mustang, don’t impress me at all. They are definitely professional sounding, but not distinct to my ear (or in the case of the Mustang, too pretentious to my ear), and maybe that’s why I don’t look up when I hear one.

Dodge seems determined to capture the “classic America Muscle-car” glory of the past. Their chasis’s are always raised up like sloping boat-hulls along the underside, and the hoods-n-shoulders are almost always flattened off and horizontal looking. Dodge models don’t seem to “growl”. They “rumble”. It’s a different sound to my ears, and it tends to vibrate the surroundings as a sign of power, instead of smoothly growling as a sign of power. Glorious, if you like that effect—always makes me look up,.. but the rumble is not musice to me. I like a growl.

Porsche is distinctive. I heard even their large Cayanne, and in spite of the size, it (deliberately) creates a small racing car growl, that sounds just at the brink of ending with a motorcycle-rumble, but never doing so. That’s a really classy sound to me.

I have SEEN a few Pontiacs, when I thought the company was out of business or something (so few are visible in NY). But I still haven’t heard one on the move yet.

I haven’t heard the Aston Martin Rapide S that’s parked in the garage across the street from my office yet. But I promise to.

Of my own XE 25t, I can say it’s a delight. Not overly showy when short-hopping from traffic light to traffic light. Almost silent when doing a balanced-throttle on the highway, and never predictable---it seems directly keyed to your foot pressure as it cycles up to each higher gear. So as my mood or my foot handles a bit differently each day, the growl is less noticeable some trips, suddenly noticeable on other days.

I have heard Mazerati Ghibli in person as a pedestrian and while passing it in my own XE. It’s my TOP personal favorite (just a hair sweeter to listen to than the XE 25t or 35T). Some say the XE and Ghibli have extremely close sounds to each other, and I think that’s right. Both spend most of their time silent while cruising, and you have to trick the transmission sometimes just to get it to remind you what an amazing exotic growl this car has. I wouldn’t be offended if someone says the XE is trying to compete with the Maz’s champion growl.

And the Alfa Romeo Gulia,… is something I saw for the first time here around NYC just this morning. The first time ever. But it split off in on a lane going north, while I continued going westbound, before I had a chance to hear anything of it from the driver’s seat of my moving car.

…And then I come home every night to the *&<^ at the corner of my block who works at a Pep Boys, and tinkers up his friends cars to be ready for illegal drag races at 1am in the morning. What excruciatingly loud yet misguidedly-pitiful sounds they make. You HEAR the darned thing when it’s still two blocks away from arriving yet. And when it does arrive, you look up, and the vehicle is crawling at 20 mpg for all that 90 mph racket.:laugh::laugh::laugh::laugh:

What's your favorite growl?