Do engineers without problems make a sound?

Imagine paying in the neighbourhood of $100,000 for a state-of-the-art, zero-to-100 km/h in-4.4-seconds automobile, and not being able to hear the throaty roar of your twin-turbo V-8 engine.

Well, the engineers at BMW have confronted just such a counter-intuitive circumstance in its M5 model. And they have responded with a solution that — well, it may seem a little otherworldly to the majority of drivers whose experience with an engine they can’t hear is generally that it wouldn’t start.

Logically, BMW could have reduced some of the insulation that makes the interior of their cars so quiet and peaceful. But that might have raised another difficulty with buyers.

So for the 2014 model — wait for it, imagining a silent drum roll seen through your car windshield! — they have recorded the sound of a similar engine, and arranged for the driver to hear that played through the sounds-ystem speakers synchronized with the real-time performance of the car.

No, really! They have. It’s called “Active Sound Design.” Check it out on the Internet. One wag in cyberspace has declared it “a car that lip-synchs.”

Now, one assumes the M5 will still be a very attractive, not to say invigorating ride. One further suspects the BMW engineers who came up with the idea were probably getting desperate for new technical challenges to tackle. Maybe, for the 2014 model year, it was either Active Sound Design, or a way of simulating the feeling of wind in your hair.

Still, you wonder when the day will come that the landscape outside our car windows will be artificial too.