Fortunate Sone

There's more than one way to measure and quantify what we hear when driving a car.

- _by Dave VanderWerp

SOUND IS CRITICAL to the automotive experience. Sometimes we need lots of it, such as when we want to hear the sweet song produced by a V-12 wailing toward redline. Other times, we want less of it. It's why we at Car and Driver measure the interior noise at the driver's ear in every vehicle we test, taking sound-level readings at idle, while cruising at 70 mph, and when blasting to 70 mph with the right pedal pinned to the floorboard (or wide-open throttle). Each listed result is an average of measurements taken during runs in both directions of our test facility's straightaway. The idle and 70-mph cruise figures are 15-second averages, while the full-throttle number is an average of peak-noise-level recordings taken during the runs.