The relationship between consumer satisfaction and psychoacoustics of electric vehicle signature sound

Abstract

The attributes of electric vehicle sound signatures have been investigated, especially considering the sound quality and warning features of the exterior sound. The interior vehicle sound quality influences both the driving pleasure and market uptake of these vehicles. To date, minimal research has been published on the consumer satisfaction and objective metrics which are linked to satisfactory electric vehicle sound. Conventional subjective methods of determining consumer satisfaction are tedious and time consuming. The possibility of a simple and efficient method for determining perceived consumer satisfaction of interior wide-open throttle sound is investigated. Several existing objective psychoacoustic metrics are used to propose a new consumer satisfaction metric for electric vehicle sound signatures. The metric is determined through multiple linear regression of psychoacoustic metrics and the subjective responses of 31 subjects. Five electric vehicle sound signatures, six enhanced sound signatures and two additional sound recordings are used as stimuli. The results show a high correlation with Sharpness, Loudness and Impulsiveness which were used to formulate potential models. The proposed metric was evaluated against an additional dataset of electric vehicle sound signatures. The simplicity and good performance of the proposed model demonstrates its potential implementation as a consumer satisfaction metric.