“Implied” would suggest that the writers intended it, which I’m sure they didn’t. A lot of writers are really good at writing “”“quirky”“” characters that fit perfectly with autistic behavior/thought patterns, but then really bad at realizing, much less acknowledging, that what they’ve written is indeed an autistic character, because too many writers think that unless a character is 1) totally nonverbal, 2) only physically capable of talking about One Special Interest, or 3) Sheldon Cooper, then they can’t possibly be autistic and people are silly for reading them that way. 🙄
But that said—along with the obvious alien synesthesia, Soundwave also demonstrates a fair amount of traits that line up with autism. Being overwhelmed by too much sensory data, in his case telepathic info. Benefitting from a stim, in his case focusing hard on a single brain’s data, to help him filter, escape, and process the overwhelming stimuli that come from other brains. Despite having actual telepathy, he has poor theory of mind, i.e. innate understanding that other people have separate interior lives and the ability to predict and understand what those interior lives are like—he’s expressed bafflement that other people are capable of navigating the world and having memories/experiences without the benefit of his telepathy-synesthesia; and he didn’t realize that humans are actual people with actual thoughts until he himself could read them. While he was never completely nonverbal in idw1, he does slip in and out of a very rigid/limited style of speech (e.g. “Humor: detected. Conclusion: amusing”). And it’s also worth noting that IRL there’s a statistically significant correlation between people having both autism and synesthesia, even if it isn’t super high.
If anything, I think his telepathy would help mask if he has autism, since he’d have a leg up on social interaction that no autistic human would have: the ability to actually read people’s minds to understand their true intentions. And we do see that he leans heavily on his telepathy in his interactions with, for instance, Ratbat and Megatron in flashbacks, to get a feel for what kind of people they are and what they really want from him, rather than being able to suss out who they are and what they want just from how they interact with him.
Now, it’s not a cut-and-dry case. As easily as you can say “Soundwave is bad at social interaction because he’s autistic but his telepathy gives him a leg up,” it’s just as easy to say “Soundwave leans on his telepathy because even for allistic people it’s more reliable to figure out if someone’s lying by straight up reading their minds.” So you COULD say oh it’s not autism.
But like when a character has a bunch of autistic traits, saying “they don’t have autism, it just looks like autism because of this fantasy/sci-fi reason!” seems like an excuse to avoid calling the character autistic when you could just as easily go “they have fantasy/sci-fi autism.”
And because no one asked, other IDW1 characters that demonstrate a lot of autistic traits that I’ve noticed include Prowl (actually the reason I got interested in him), Rung, Nightbeat… and Shockwave unfortunately, because he picked up basically all his autistic-coded traits from a lobotomy and because of that lobotomy went on to try to destroy the universe a couple times, which is a pretty messed up narrative, but oh well there you have it. Others have picked up more, Nautica is a good example.
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