Remember how great cars used to sound?

If you remember the episode of "Leave It To Beaver" in which the Beav says he's going to Gilbert's house to work on some new noises, well, welcome to American boyhood.

We love noises, at all ages. And if we can't make our own noises, we always have recordings to enjoy.

Noises are part of maleness, and are something that most women don't seem to enjoy, in my experience.  I might be wrong.

But over in England, where they seem to do everything right, the British Library, noticing that Jaguar cars are going to be battery-powered soon, has made recordings of the last combustion-engine Jaguar sports car made, so that future generations will be able to marvel at the sounds of perfectly tuned engines roaring, shifting gears, and accelerating.

As the Jaguar company moves toward a "quieter electric future," the recordings are being made at their engineering plant in central England.  Appropriately for a car with a feline name, the Jag engine growls, and that sound will be available for your children's children to hear at the library, which also has available the recorded sounds of the first automobiles.

Purr.

Charles Richardson, a senior sound engineer with Jaguar, said the sounds were "something we want to be available for generations to come. Archiving it with the British Library allows us to do that, and that's something we're very proud of."

They have recorded a 30-second and a 47-second track featuring the engine starting, and being revved up, and "the crisp upshifts and downshifts through the 8-speed Quickshift transmission, and the distinctive, hallmark crackles and pops on the overrun from its quad tailpipes."

Apparently, riding in a Jaguar sounds like eating Rice Krispies! 

In 2025, Jaguar will become a "pure electric modern luxury brand," and that means no more of the polluting internal combustions engines we have driven since who knows when.

But don't worry. Guys will make the noises even if the cars do not.