A SUBJECTIVE EVALUATION AND ANALYSIS OF AUTOMOTIVE STARTER SOUNDS

Recent years have seen a greater emphasis in the automotive industry o n vehicle sound quality. Out of this work has come the realization tha t the customer's perception of the vehicle acoustic environment is an important part of overall customer satisfaction with the vehicle. The fact that component noise also contributes to this perception motivate d this study of starter noise. The key elements of this work are the s ubjective evaluation and analysis methods (based on the paired compari son method) that allow the perception of starter sound to be measured in a quantitative way. Using these methods, we have learned the follow ing: 1. Interior starter sounds are quite different from the sound mea sured at the source; 2. Three factors were found to govern the percept ion of luxury car starter sound quality: start time, loudness, and aco ustic quality; 3. Start time and acoustic quality are equally importan t and both are more important than loudness. In a more general sense, the methodologies presented in this paper may be used to study the sou nd quality of other vehicle systems or components. By bridging the gap between subjective perception and numeric engineering quantities, the methods described here provide a means for bringing the voice of the customer directly into the vehicle engineering process.