User-Perceived Quality Analysis of the In-Vehicle Ambient Light System

This work examines the so-called in-vehicle ambient lighting, also known as atmosphere light, with particular respect to customers' perceived quality. The ambient light concept applied to the automotive world, in general, is quite recent. It was first developed to make the automobile's interior compartment as comfortable as possible; then, over the past few years, it has been implemented together with other in-vehicle systems such as ADAS and infotainment in order to gain a more functional role. I had the opportunity to focus on this field of study during my Master's internship at Maserati Innovation Lab headquarters in Modena, where I dealt with the global problem to assess the ambient lighting-related parameters objectively. Due to this notion's newness, there are not any standards available for this system evaluation and development phases. More into detail, while collaborating with the Maserati Perceived Quality team, I have carried out a series of operations in order to gather potential customers' wants and needs. This was achieved through a starting benchmark analysis of Maserati's main competitors, followed by the focus-group research method. Afterward, the ambient lighting prototype for the user test procedure was developed. These procedures allow to define the vehicle technical specifications, that is to say fundamental parameters necessary to respect FCA-Group's directives referring to the vehicle development process. Despite all the challenges presented by the Covid-19 global pandemic's impact, we managed to carry out our research obtaining satisfying results. As a matter of fact, we identified potential customers' perceptions on ambient lighting, and we designed a user-test useful for gathering lighting-related technical parameters.