In recent years the European automotive market has seen the introduction of an increasing number of battery electric vehicles, i.e. vehicles powered by a purely electric powertrain without an internal combustion engine. Although electric powertrains give rise to a different set of vehicle noise problems which need to be better investigated and understood in general, that has been hardly possible until recently due to their limited availability on the market. Nowadays the situation has improved and a reasonable number of battery electric vehicles from several different car makers are available. Based on experimental investigation of the current European market sample, this paper presents a first picture of the state of the art for what concerns the NVH package trends and the acoustic performance in the interior passenger compartment of those vehicles.
