Using an Interactive NVH Simulator to Capture and Understand Customer Opinions about Vehicle Sound Quality

An Interactive NVH Simulator offers significant benefits to the vehicle NVH process by allowing non-NVH experts (such as real customers. managers and decision-makers) to directly experience and assess the NVH of virtual as well as real vehicles under normal free-driving conditions. This means that it is now possible to include the opinions of real customers in the NVH engineering process because the evaluation of NVH data no longer requires the specialist knowledge and experience of trained experts. This has enabled customer-focused decisions for NVH at the concept and detailed engineering phases of a new vehicle project.

This paper briefly describes the interactive NVH Simulator and explains how it can be used to improve the effectiveness of decision-making within the NVH process. It also presents some results from a recent research study aimed at developing techniques to capture, understand and analyse the whole experience of assessing sounds in the NVH Simulator, which includes how assessors drive throughout their evaluations.