Understanding the Opinion Forming Processes of Experts and Customers During Evaluations of Automotive Sounds

A challenge in automotive engineering is to understand the subjective reactions of individuals to vehicle sounds; this is necessary in order to improve decision making during product design. We can use "structured evaluations" to achieve this, but we need to ensure that 1) we understand the reasons behind such evaluations i.e. the opinion forming process and 2) that such evaluations are analogous to appraisals of vehicles on the road. Hence for structured evaluations to be effective, it is important that we understand the opinion forming process in real-life situations. Since there is a lack of knowledge on how people form perceptions aboutvehicles in reality, an appraisals framework is described in this paper. Moreover, this paper discusses a pilot study that investigated how experts assess vehicle sounds on-road, as well as planned future studies to examine how customers evaluate automotive sounds.