SUPPLIER EYE

Are you innovating for NVH?

I'll never forget the experience, as a kid, of lifting the massive steel hood of my father's 1971 Dodge Monaco and seeing nothing but V8 engine and a few rubber hoses. The vast compartment was so uncluttered, I could look straight down and see the pavement. By comparison, the view under today's vehicle hoods reveals a dense landscape of technologies aimed at acoustic control: covers, shields and insulators designed to keep injector clatter, induction honk and even pulley whirl muffled.

Supplier innovations are central to winning the ongoing war with NVH-noise, vibration and harshness. The battle started decades ago and will certainly increase in the future. This is an engineering realm with numerous tradeoffs involving total piece cost, capital cost, stranded fixed capital, tooling complexity/count, system optimization, flexibility, intellectual property and even downstream warranty. But because NVH (more accurately, the lack of it) has direct impact on the end customer, it has become a commitment rather than an option across vehicle segments.