An In-Depth Study on the Customer Perception of the Noise Emitted by Electric Vehicles

Lucia Celiberti; Vanni Falasca; Mirella Soldati; Laura Borgarello; Alessandra Meriga; Piercarlo Miglietta

doi:10.4271/2022-01-0968

The interior soundscape inElectric Vehicles (EV) shows a huge difference with respect to conventional vehicles: the lack of masking from an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) dramatically changes the customer’s driving experience. In addition to this, new and supplementary acoustic sources become more relevant, and these sources may play a crucial role in determining the noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH) footprint of the electrified vehicle.

This paper describes how an engineering process can manage the customer’s perception of noise emitted by an EV.

This process requires the implementation of a few typical steps:

First, the definition of the relevant subjective aspects with respect to EV vehicles; this is a preliminary phase that will help describe and choose the sounds to be reproduced in the second phase of the project, together with the key aspects to focus on
Second, a subjective test phase, to assess the sound quality using headphones playback,
Third, a selection of objective parameters to describe the subjective perception,
Finally, the establishment of correlations between the subjective and objective data collected.

This methodology is a well-established one as concerns ICEs, while EV sound does not benefit from the 100+ years of historical experience; with EV sound we are in the realm of novelty.

The end customer must be introduced to the world of EV sound: this is why the work contained in this study focuses on EV vehicles only; using both naïve and so-called expert judgement. The main goal is focused on qualifying the noise emitted by an electric motor.

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An In-Depth Study on the Customer Perception of the Noise Emitted by Electric Vehicles 2022-01-0968

SAE MOBILUS