Challenges of achieving better NVH performance for Chinese domestic brands

The NVH performance of a vehicle largely influence customer’s perception and satisfaction of vehicle perceived quality. Vehicle manufacturers have spent significant amount of resources to optimize vehicle NVH to meet the increasing demand of consumers. Recently, the industry has become more aggressive in its lightweighting actions, and the rate of introducing new technology to improve customer’s experience is accelerating. The trend of lightweighting, vehicle electrification, V2X connectivity, intelligence, and autonomous driving as well as eco-design for customer health and environment protection has placed several challenges for vehicle NVH development. First, vehicle weight reduction is a well-known strategy for improving fuel consumption and reducing CO2 emission in vehicles. However, reducing vehicle weight has inevitable consequences for the strength and stiffness of the systems and structures affected. If not implemented carefully, lightweighting strategies can lead to NVH issues that are potentially difficult to remedy because these issues could arise from fundamental design of the vehicle body structure and complex system interactions. Secondly, the combination of lightweighting, electrification, increased demand for advanced driver-assistance system (ADAS), connectivity contents, and faster product cadences has affected overall vehicle cost amortization. This cost amortization limits NVH strategies for noise source design, structural solidity and sound package content. Thirdly, for Chinese car manufacturers, pursuing better NVH performance has become a very important competitive focus in China market to establish brand images and compete with well-known global brands. This paper presents NVH development strategies and techniques to combat these challenges.