Each country has its own distinctive mechanical soundtrack – a machine that makes a sound that instantly transports you there. The hiss and gurgle of a La Marzocco coffee machine rising above the background chatter – we’re in a café in Italy. The unmistakable whoosh and screech of the Underground pulling into a Tube station transports you to the UK, specifically London, even before your nose catches that unique hot-electrics whiff and you hear the ‘Mind the Gap’ warning.
Ireland is an old diesel tractor thudding away over fields covered in mist that would be classed as rain anywhere else. Japan has a wealth of distinctive-sounding machines – take your pick from the click-and-ping of the Pachinko parlours in a Tokyo back street or the violent door-slam of the Shinkansen hammering through a station at 300 km/h, separated from you by only a few feet and those automatic metal grilles that rise up to stop it sucking folk into its wake.
But the sound of the US of A is clear – it’s the rumbly woofle of the V8 motor. It’s a sound that was never common elsewhere, and is now so rare on European roads we automatically swivel our heads to locate its source. If you did that in the US you would suffer from a terminally cricked neck. The V8 is – still – everywhere in the US urban soundscape. And as Jonny Smith pointed out in his excellent piece, it’s not as if it’s coming exclusively from muscle cars. No, V8s are just as likely to turn up under the hood of that post-office truck, baggy old RV or battle-scarred police cruiser as in bicep-flexing Chargers, Camaros or Mustangs.
