There's no official rule anywhere that says this, but many folks tend to use the sound made by closing a vehicle's door as a measure of overall quality. That "thunk" or "thud" has to hit just right, both literally and percussively; it must be bassy, rich but muted in just the right amount, and cannot echo or reverberate with tinniness of any kind. Like setting down a heavy book in a cavernous library, the sound is satisfying when you hear it.
"Which came first, a good door thunk or the demand for a good door thunk" is a story for another time, but, unsurprisingly, automakers put a lot of time and consideration into implementing a good thunk. Some have standardized the action, and others haven't, but the general consensus is thunks are just as important a part of quality control as anything else.
A Deliberate Strike
When you swing a car door shut and it produces the sound that is the subject of this piece, it is the result of many different contact points—weatherstrips, stoppers, latch, lock, striker—colliding. How the door and body panels respond to the force is immediately subsequent to that.
Cadillac virtual validation architect Alan Moyer likens it to a symphony.
"The door latch releases internal energy as it engages into the secondary and primary positions," he says. "This generates sounds from the latch itself but also transfers bursts of energy from these two events into the door and vehicle via contact between the latch and metal body striker."
The symphony doesn't end there. "The latch sound cascades through all hollow cavities, and the energy converts to sound as it excites many components and structural pieces along the way," Moyer adds. "The door latch then thumps the body striker as full impact is made, and then holds on to the striker during door rebound, like an extremely aggressive handshake taking place between the two. There's a significant amount of energy needing to be dissipated during this handshake.
Additional sounds are generated in both the door and the rest of the vehicle as the vehicle attempts to manage all of this energy (e.g., squeaks and rattles, resonance and ringing tones, etc. ). Together, the initial contact sounds, the latch mechanism, and the energy dissipation sounds blend to form the overall soundbite we hear."
Harmonizing all of this and then damping it well is how you achieve the optimal thunk.
Standardizing the Un-Standardizable
As with corporate styling, automakers also aim to standardize the sounds doors make across their model lineups. If you pay attention, Cadillacs sound like Cadillacs and Porsches sound like Porsches. But cars come in all different sizes, shapes, and weights, and each of these aspects has to be taken into account when fine-tuning a door-close response. Here's how the four automakers we reached out to approach the issue and internally measure quality.
Toyota
"Toyota has implemented a standard door structure as part of our TNGA architecture," a senior engineering manager at Toyota Motor North America R&D told us. "The resonance of the structure and interaction of mechanical parts is tuned to achieve a solid thud sound and minimize any noises that stand out.
"[We use] a variety of prediction methods and simulation tools to develop and ensure related parts perform at a component level and all work in harmony as a system," they continued. "Then our engineers and technicians further tune the response in our pre-production phases to ensure we reach the high bar set by our TNGA standards."
Hyundai
"There's no uniformity in the way the doors 'sound' when they close," a member of Hyundai's service quality team tells us. "There's too much variation model to model: the weight of the door, size of the door (angular momentum), area of the door seal, back pressure from the internal cabin volume. During vehicle development, Hyundai designers, engineers, and quality teams focus on the optimal balance by taking all of the above variables into account. In order to reduce overall vehicle weight, OEMs are using various materials and thicknesses, which can lead to the door feeling tinny when it closes. This is something we strive to avoid.
"Closing effort is one of the Hyundai quality confirmations that is measured," they continue. "This is impacted by other components aside from door itself, including interior volume and by what are called extractors, which allow some of the air pressure to escape from the interior when closing the door (otherwise closing efforts must be increased to overcome the reaction forces)."
Cadillac
Moyer groups door thuds into three groups. The first is "a poor experience," which he defines as: "Attracts one's attention in a negative way because the sound is less than desirable. An example of this can be something as simple as an annoying rattle sound or a door outer panel that sounds like someone kicked a large, empty metal drum."
Then there's "simply goes unnoticed: The sound doesn't offend, but it also doesn't impress."
Third: "Impressive," which "grabs one's attention in a positive way because the sound has this attractive, pleasing 'thunk' to it, a sound that screams quality, solid, attention to detail, and refinement."
Moyer told us Cadillac "listens to dozens of vehicles across all vehicle brands" to separate the overall door-closing soundbites into their various sources. From there, it figures out how to "tune" everything to work together.
"This tuning is not an overnight event and involves many updates to our 'Design Best Practices' or specific contenting strategies," he said. "One misconception is that achieving good or excellent sound quality is based on throwing a lot of content at the vehicle, thus incurring additional mass and cost. On the contrary, any sound-quality enablers can be baked right into 'Design Best Practices' for free. It's just a matter of considering sound when designing one's parts."
As for Cadillac's performance uniformity over time: "We can now simply follow our known recipe to ensure an impressive performance," Moyer says.
Porsche
"Usually, the previous vehicle in the model line is used as a benchmark, and the acoustics of the new vehicle must match or closely resemble those of the previous model," Porsche's engineering and development team in Germany tells us via a company rep. They used the second-generation Cayenne when developing the third-generation Cayenne as an example. "Which vehicle is specifically chosen as the benchmark is determined by the responsible model line experts in collaboration with colleagues that work specifically on sounds and acoustics."
Have you ever shut a modern 911's door before? It's incredible. Try it out, treat yourself.
"The goal of development in this field at Porsche is for [a] high-quality, muffled, short-duration closing sound, free of other unwanted noises," the rep said. "There are no physical guidelines to consider regarding, for example, maximum noise level or tonality, as this is an impulsive and not a time-continuous sound that goes over a longer duration."
Clearly, door thunks don't have to undergo rigorous testing in order to meet federal standardization, like emissions or crashworthiness. But anyone who rides in a car will experience that thunk. It is an invisible but highly tangible, concussive aspect as important to the experience as anything that isn't driving. Next time you slam a car door, know the response is the result of a highly deliberate process.
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December 06, 2023 at 12:33AM
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Door Thunks: How Automakers Engineer the Perfect Door-Closing Sound - MotorTrend
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