Questionnaire Survey on the Encounter Experience with Quiet Vehicles

Relative quietness of electric or hybrid electric vehicles is one of the most important topics in environmental acoustics. Although reduced vehicle noise is eligible for urban sound environment, it is also a matter of pedestrians' safety concern. Hence, regulations regarding additional warning sounds for the quiet vehicles have been developing in Japan as well as in global. Recently the UN-regulation regarding the warning system to compensate their quietness by additional warning device, Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System (AVAS) according to the regulation, has been approved. Those kind of measures should be carefully discussed. Several studies have been conducted in different institutions to examine the feasible sound design for the warning to be detected in urban noise environment. This paper introduces the result of a questionnaire survey on the risks and encounter experiments with of quiet vehicles on streets, and also on the recognition with the additional warning sounds. The survey was conducted via internet form, and collected answers from Japanese younger generation. The result was compared with the similar survey carried by the author in 2012.