Electric vehicles are now part of the everyday automotive landscape. The resulting sonic experience is a major challenge for driver comfort. Despite this challenge being known, no solution reaching general consensus has yet been proposed. This might be due to the lack of a common culture of the sound or the expected sonic target in electric vehicles, in opposition to what existed for thermal engine. This work proposes a decisive tool to enhance communication on sound description in the electric car cabin. Inspired by soundscape studies, the methodology consists in using a semi-structured questionnaire oriented toward sound description and judgment with 12 acousticians working on electric vehicles. A verbal analysis identifies 11 specific sound names describing this sonic environment. Definitions that include three levels of description: causal, reduced and hedonic as well as audio illustrations, are proposed for each sound name. The lexicon is validated by the same group of acousticians and available online.
Duroyon et al. (Tue,) studied this question.