The best sounding cars of all time

Thursday, 8 April 2021

Aston Martin reveals its $4.2m Vulcan at Cromwell's Highlands motorsport park.

As we move into the age of electricity, one of the biggest losers in the car scene is the sound. EVs will surely bring their own awesome noises to motoring but the big combustion engines of days gone by have a certain allure that is impossible to replicate.

It’s not a total goodbye yet but with various cities and countries pledging to phase out combustion power, Budget Direct decided to rank the best sounding cars of all time.

But better yet, you can vote to push your favourite car on the list higher up the rankings.

Budget Direct combined a selection of best-sounding car lists from reputable car websites and isolated the 100 most commonly occurring overall by brand and engine type. Then they searched for “[car model] + sound” on YouTube and scraped the view count of the top 12 videos.

The Lamborghini Veneno was rated by the Budget Direct researchers as the best sounding car of all time.

* Is your car worth a hashtag?

* Aston Martin Valkyrie V12 turns it up to 11 (thousand)

* Ferrari F40 tops best supercar poll

The team then combined and averaged these views out and ranked the cars by views to give us the ‘most popular engine sounds’. Data was collected in February 2021.

At the time of publication, the list was headed by the Lamborghini Veneno, effectively a highly customised Aventador developed by the Italian manufacturer for its 50th birthday.

Following are the Ferrari Enzo, BMW M5 (the V10-powered E60 generation), Lexus LFA and the 2019 Porsche 911 GT3 RS. But there are a fair few other gems in the list, like the Ford GT40, Mercedes-AMG C 63, Nissan Skyline GT-R and Pagani Zonda R. The Golf VR6 R32 even made the list.

To be honest, all the cars here sound absolutely fantastic. Go ahead and write off the rest of the day, voting on this list requires maximum attention. And volume.