Design and prototyping of an Advanced Acoustic Vehicle Alerting System for Electric Vehicles

In the past decade Electric Vehicles (EV) surely became a trending topic in the automo-tive world. Most car makers developed this new technology, some of them electrifyingmodels they already produced, such as FIAT with its 500e and Ford with its Mustang MACH-e, some of them adding a supporting electric motor to the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE), such as Toyota with its Auris and Jeep with its Renegade, and some others again making brand new models, completely electrified from the beginning, like Tesla withits Model S and Model 3. This transition is quickly leading to one of the biggest changes in automotive history and, as a result of the exciting interest in electric mobility, brings to the attention of carmanufacturer a lot of new challenges. One of these new challenges is to make electric (or hybrid) vehicles emit sounds: this particular problem is crucial, in fact often the sound ofelectric motors is quite inaudible, both from the cockpit and from the outside. While external sound production is being subject to regulation from the main regulatorauthorities - US Congress, Japanese government and European Commission are the main promoters of the regulation -, internal cockpit sound is not subject to any rule. For this reason internal sound can be designed not only with the alerting aim in mind, but also with the proposal of giving back the driving feeling to the driver, lost with the transitionfrom the Internal Combustion Engine to the Electric Motor. In addition, internal sound generation can be treated as a branding characteristic and car makers can develop an original sound propriety in order to become more recognizable to the buyers. With the paramount help and the contribution of Teoresi S.p.A., a leader company in the consulting world, which core area of expertise is the Automotive world, this project has come to the light and led to the prototyping of a working device which is able to make an Electric Vehicle emit actual sound. In this Master Thesis different design approaches for internal cockpit sound generationwill be explored. A sound generation server will be employed in both approaches, using "supercollider" as programming language. The communication between the vehicle’s Electronic Control Unit (ECU) and the sound generation server will be managed via a python script, that will receive and filter vehicle’s CAN bus messages and will send the commands to the sound generation server, using "Open Sound Control" socket (OSC). All these technologies are open source tools and already widely employed in the automo-tive world. In the end, a desktop GUI application for test benching the sound generation algorithm without using the real vehicle, will be developed, using "python" and "kivy".