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There are certain things about cars that I have never been able to explain without sounding a little bit insane.
I know what an old BMW smells like. Not every BMW, obviously, but there is something about leather, carpet and plastics that have spent years baking underneath the sun. Mercedes-Benz smells different. So does a Jaguar, an Audi, a Honda. I could probably close my eyes inside some of the cars I grew up around and guess what I was sitting in.
I love steering wheels for the same reason: the thin ones, the fat ones, the strangely enormous ones from older cars. And then there is the engine. I have always loved opening the hood just to look, listening to it idle and feeling the faint vibration through the car.
It is alive. Or, at least, that is what I have spent most of my life believing.
Perhaps that is why electric cars feel somewhat unsettling to me. They do not answer back. You press a button and they are ready. There is no cough, no shudder, no engine settling into itself, no faint vibration through the steering wheel.
One Sunday morning in September, I brought that uneasiness to Nice Car! Studio, a Jakarta car community made up mostly of people in their 20s and founded by Xavier, who grew up around his father's workshop.
Hadin, whose family bought and sold cars and motorcycles, remembered his first time driving an EV.
“What do you mean, this car is on?” he remembered thinking. “There are no vibrations or sounds whatsoever.”
The silence took some getting used to.
But that silence is quickly becoming the sound of Indonesian roads. Government data shows that sales of EVs reached 117,000 units in the first half of 2026, up 69.4 percent from a year earlier. That works out to one in every four new passenger cars bought in the country.
For people like us who grew up on engine noise, the shift to electric cars challenges what we have always understood a car to be. I should admit I now drive an EV myself, so this is less a report from the sidelines than a conversation among people working out what to keep and what to let go.
Like cooking steak in a microwave
Xavier understands the appeal. He drives a diesel every day, but the advantages of an EV are difficult to dismiss in Jakarta.
“It’s very convenient,” he admitted, especially when it means avoiding the odd-even restriction.
Still, he prefers combustion cars. “EVs don't have a soul,” he said. “Don’t have the engine noise, don’t have like […] the heritage itself.”
Neoma, whose interest in automobiles began with Top Gear and a father who loved anything with an engine, put it less sentimentally. To him, driving an EV was like “driving a microwave”.
“It gets things done,” he said. “You can microwave a steak, but that does not mean you should. A steak is better cooked in a pan.”
Someone beside him added, “With fire.”
The table laughed, but the comparison stayed. Older cars ask more from us, sometimes far more than they deserve. They develop noises, quirks and problems you become embarrassingly knowledgeable about. Soon you are speaking about the car as though it has moods.
She’s being difficult today. She does not like traffic. She is angry with me.
Some owners even swear you should be careful what you say around an old car. Complain about selling it and something breaks. Tell it she did well after a long drive and somehow the engine feels smoother the next morning.
Mechanically, this makes no sense. Car people understand it anyway.
Donny Sihabuddin Sarwono has spent more than two decades around motorsport as a professional test driver and team principal with DSR Racing, with experience in karting and touring cars in Indonesia and Asia.
“For me, the roar of an internal combustion engine creates a deep emotional connection between driver and car,” he said. “You just can't replicate that in an EV.” Yet he recently bought one himself.
Before we ever learned to drive
Xavier grew up in his father's workshop. Cars later gave him friendships, a community and eventually Nice Car! Studio itself.
“For me, cars are something very sentimental lah,” he said. “I love the culture, the lifestyle, everything around cars.”
Ardha grew up watching her father search for old cars he had wanted but could not afford when he was younger. Years later, he would hunt for those same models.
Cars became a language between my father and me too. If I spotted something old and named the model, sometimes even the engine, his face would change slightly.
Oh, you actually know this stuff.
It was small, but I held onto it. Knowing cars became one of the ways I knew how to speak to him.
My car was a 2006 Jaguar S-Type in British racing green.
I bought it while studying in Newcastle with money I had earned myself. It was not the finest achievement in British engineering, and anyone familiar with aging Jaguars may stop laughing now. I had gone to work for that car. Every shift became gas, insurance, maintenance and eventually a set of keys that were mine.
At Nice Car! Studio, I called it “the love of my life”. Everyone laughed. I did too. I was not completely joking.
Hadin's father gave him a 1996 Mercedes-Benz W202 when he turned 17. It arrived in terrible condition with one rule: when he sold it, it had to leave his hands better than when it arrived. He drove it through high school and still thinks about buying another.
“Nothing can compete,” he said of the memories he had with that car.
Ardha's first car was a Jeep, also given to her at 17. She learned to drive in it, had her first crash in it and later watched her father sell it to help pay for university in London. She cried. Someday, she wants another one, and wants to give one to her own child when they turn 17.
The problem with romance is that it costs money
Then Jakarta enters the conversation and ruins everything.
The fantasy of owning an old gas car takes place on a Sunday morning. The roads are empty, the engine is warm and nobody needs to be anywhere urgently. Owning one on a Tuesday afternoon is different.
You are stuck somewhere between Sudirman and South Jakarta. The fuel gauge is sinking anyway, the air conditioning is fighting for its life and a noise underneath the hood has appeared that you are trying not to think about until payday.
Suddenly, the silent EV beside you becomes very attractive.
Ardha likes electric cars for exactly this reason. She can charge at home and drive without worrying about odd-even restrictions. Her father had owned a Mercedes-AMG G63, but taxes and upkeep made it increasingly difficult to justify. They still loved the G-Class, so they replaced it with its electric counterpart.
Nobody had changed sides. They had simply found another way to live with a car they loved.
Donny said he used to spend Rp 2.5 million to Rp 3 million a month on fuel for his combustion car. His monthly EV charging costs now stay below Rp 500,000. They are his own figures, but in Jakarta traffic the appeal is easy to understand.
He is hardly alone: the jump in EV sales suggests plenty of Indonesian drivers are running the same math.
There is gas. Tax. Parts. Maintenance. Parking. A specialist mechanic who somehow only answers WhatsApp every third Thursday. There is also a salary.
Whenever I forget that, I look at fuel prices and become remarkably progressive.
But it’s not just about costs.
At Nice Car! Studio, someone described the smooth silhouettes, screens and minimalist dashboards of newer cars as “NPC cars”.
Donny disagreed. Many newer EVs are more striking, he said, and their instant motor response and steering precision have made performance more accessible. He described his EV's rear-wheel-drive traction as “more emotional and engaging,” especially through corners.
For Donny, a car's “soul” comes from steering feel, suspension dynamics and power delivery, or motor response in an EV. Those qualities have to suit the driver's personality. Yet he still believes the authentic sound of a combustion engine cannot really be replaced. The engine noise may be gone, but driver involvement, to him, has not disappeared with it.
What if they learn to breathe too?
Since getting an EV, I have been caught in a similar contradiction. I spend hours in it alone, usually crawling through Jakarta traffic. I have named it. I talk to it.
CarPlay sometimes refuses to connect. The wipers occasionally decide they do not want to turn off. I get irritated, restart the car and find myself saying, Ayo, please. Jangan sekarang. (Come on, please. Not now.)
The embarrassing part is that this is exactly how enthusiasts talk about older cars. Learn what annoys it, learn what fixes it, spend enough time together that its inconveniences become part of the routine.
The cars we romanticize have had a considerable head start. Hadin's Mercedes carried him through high school. Ardha's Jeep holds her first years of driving and a piece of her relationship with her father. Xavier's attachment began in a workshop before becoming a community of his own. Today's EVs have not had those decades yet.
That does not mean combustion cars lose what made them special. Neoma would still rather have his steak made with fire. Xavier still talks about heritage. Donny still misses the engine note. I still love the smell of an old interior, the steering wheel in my hands and the feeling of an engine trembling underneath the hood.
But an electric car now waits for me downstairs, and somewhere between the traffic, failed CarPlay connections and telling its wipers to please behave, it stopped feeling entirely anonymous.
Someday, the cars being bought now may become the ones people learn to drive in, survive first accidents in, or keep in a garage long after it stops making financial sense. Someone may spend an irresponsible amount restoring one because it was the car their parent used to drive.
There was never literally a beating heart underneath the hood. Maybe we were the ones putting something there all along.
