Automobile Auditory Experience: A Pilot Study

The automobile industry is in the transformation period: from traditional combustion vehicles to new energy vehicles. It is of great significance for automobile companies and researchers to understand users’ concerns during this period, as well as the changes in automobile sound brought by the transformation. This paper reports on a mixed-method study of a survey of typical users and interviews with ten experts from a large automobile company. The aim was to identify current concerns of automobile and identify methods to improve the auditory experience. The key findings are: (1) automobile’s power was the most concerned factor; the second group of user concerns relates to appearance, price, and driving experience, followed by configuration, accelerating performance, and fuel consumption. Environmental friendliness were the least concerned factors. (2) Human evolution, human needs, driving contexts, the human five senses, and natural sounds consistent with the particular frequency band were current industrial understanding of the design of automobile auditory experience; and consistency, anti-interference mechanism, and redundancy design were considered as the design principles of auditory experience by automobile developers; and they use comparison and users’ subjective evaluation for auditory experience evaluation; a holistic framework of auditory experience was expected by developers to enhance their understanding of it. This paper contributes to a deeper understanding of automobile auditory experience by bringing together the viewpoints of automobile users and developers.