The Aston Martin DB11 follows the increasingly worrying trend in expensive cars that they are loud loud grr ahem loud, especially when you start them up. The new DB11, however, also offers a hush soft whisper whisper quiet mode.
The quiet mode detail popped into my news feed in the middle of Autoweek’s first drive review:
Once you’re done taking in the exquisite leather and rich veneers, punch the starter button smack dab in the center of the dash and the motor will kick to life with a rip and a snarl. Or, you can hold the same button down for a quiet start — lame but courteous.
Part of that quietude may be a courteous turn back towards subtlety for today’s sports cars. But I wonder if the DB11's stop-start mode make this quiet start programming very necessary. Driving around town with your car going AHEM YES LOOK AT ME I AM EXPENSIVE every time you leave a stoplight might get tiring.
In any case, it’s a weird sort of state of the car world that automakers are engineering their cars to be so loud (possibly illegally loud in the case of the Jaguar F-Type, which burns extra fuel in the exhaust just to scream its presence on the road) that they also have to engineer in a quiet mode.