Re: Toyota Prius Refinement Issues
The environment in which I have been running subjective experiments is within an NVH (noise, vibration and harshness) simulator. We captured sounds and vibrations from a Toyota Prius under a number of tests which covered the full spectrum of HEV specific driving conditions.
Once we had captured the appropriate data (sounds, vibrations, component switching), we needed to make sure that the correct HEV control strategy was in place to be able to reproduce exactly what was being heard, felt and used whilst driving the vehicle in the real world. By being able to reproduce the Toyota Prius operations within a virtual world we are able to change the configurations of the standard model, increase/decrease the initial Battery SOC, change the control strategy (e.g. EV only mode lengthening), for example. Then get subjects to drive the vehicle and assess how they perceive the refinement of the vehicle. Once you test a number of different configurations and control strategies it is then possible to find out some of the more objective measures for these by feeding in the actual drive cycles used by the subjects into a performance model to see what the emissions, fuel economy, etc. would have been.
It was felt that not enough subjective assessment of customers was being considered early on before in the design loop in conjunction with the more objective side. Once we understand what customers like to feel and hear, it is then easier to see whether a particular vehicle design is feasible in terms of costs, manufacturing, performance, etc. Whereas before, the first real input a customer can have is when they see the vehicle for the first time in a showroom, when it is too late to have any real significant input into the vehicle they want, apart from air conditioning yes/no or car colour for example.
So trying to find out some of your views may help with the kind of important questions I’d need to ask, and what kind of experiments are worthwhile involving potential customers in.
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