American V8 sound for Tesla

The sound of a cross-plane V8

The American V8 is the deep, uneven burble most people picture when they think of a muscle car. It comes from the cross-plane crankshaft: the eight cylinders fire four times per turn of the crank, but not evenly from one bank to the other, so each exhaust receives its pulses at irregular intervals. That irregularity is the burble at idle and the rumble at low revs.

TesRev models it as a 6.2-litre naturally aspirated V8 with a 6-speed automatic gearbox: idle at 700 rpm, rev limiter at 6,500 rpm, a low firing note around 47 Hz at idle that climbs past 400 Hz near the limiter.

Stock or tuned?

The American V8 keeps a factory exhaust: full and deep, with a gentle crackle when you lift off. The Tuned American V8 sounds like the same engine with straight pipes and an aggressive camshaft: a choppier idle, a harder edge under load, and pops and bangs on lift-off and on each downshift.

Both follow the way you drive your Tesla. Press the accelerator and the engine revs up and shifts; ease off and it drops back, with a throttle blip on downshifts. TesRev uses your Tesla's mass, power and drag to turn each acceleration into engine load, so a gentle drive stays at low revs and a hard launch runs to the limiter.

Other engines

Prefer a higher-pitched sound? Try the flat-plane V8, which screams instead of burbling, or the V10. All the engines, with their clips, are on the engines page.