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As pressures mount to remove physical prototyping from the vehicle development process, there is a growing need for subjective evaluations of virtual prototypes. Virtually assessing NVH vehicle targets and using driving simulators to make those early critical design decisions is becoming a larger part of the NVH engineering process. Today this is only possible if you put a driving simulator at the center of your development process. Being able to drive and evaluate both test and simulation results simultaneously in a simulator allows engineering teams to leverage a hybrid engineering approach. By starting with measured on-road data from a physical vehicle, engineers can build virtual prototypes. By using this hybrid engineering process to incorporate CAE and test data together an engineer can create a virtual vehicle model with the desired NVH characteristics as a physical vehicle.

A full vehicle NVH Simulator has been developed to provide a realistic interactive in-car environment where a subject can experience multi-modal stimuli ( accurately reproduced sound and vibration as well as visual ) whilst either driving or being driven. This paper describes its use in learning about the strategies subjects employ during sound evaluations, and how this information can help optimise decision making during product development. It is possible to understand how subjects assess the sound of vehicles, both in the way that they drive the vehicle and importantly which elements of the sound character have greatest influence on their evaluation of the vehicle. It is also possible to compare the strategies employed by NVH engineers, company decision-makers and non-experts such as customers.