A veteran Hyundai sound engineer is calling for NVH testing practices to be rethought now that electric vehicles use synthesized sound as a deliberate design feature rather than something to be eliminated. Dong Chul Park, who led sound development for the Ioniq 5 N and Ioniq 6 N during nearly 30 years at Hyundai Motor Group and now advises OEMs independently, argues that traditional NVH metrics such as sound pressure level, loudness, sharpness and roughness were built to quantify unwanted noise, not to assess whether an artificially engineered sound succeeds in creating driver excitement.
Park highlights a specific technical gap: synchronization between audible cues, haptic feedback and vehicle dynamics is rarely instrumented, specified with a tolerance, or signed off as a formal engineering requirement. Drawing on his experience integrating sound with virtual gearshift and haptic feedback, he notes that a timing drift of only a few tens of milliseconds between the audible and physical events can make an otherwise well-executed feature feel unconvincing, even when each subsystem passes its own validation independently.
He also points to an organizational issue: sound, haptics, and vehicle control are typically measured and signed off separately by different teams, meaning a product can pass every individual test while failing as an integrated sensory experience.
Park's proposals are to formally specify and measure cross-domain synchronization as a test parameter, and to systematically record subjective driver feedback alongside objective data, since he says the absence of archived human judgments, rather than the maturity of AI itself, is currently limiting progress on predictive perceived-quality tools.
Source: Automotive Testing Technology International — read the original article