Understanding young Chinese consumers’ perception of passenger car form in rear quarter view by integrating quantitative and qualitative analyses

Abstract

The characteristics of young Chinese consumers’ perception of passenger car form in rear quarter view are explored by integrating quantitative and qualitative analyses to help designers understand young consumers’ aesthetic appreciation. Based on investigation into consumers’ judgment on similarity between car forms, the classification and the perceptual map are obtained by cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling, respectively. The distribution and form change of 78 samples in the perceptual map are analyzed qualitatively. The findings show that (1) the characteristics of consumers’ perception of passenger car form in rear quarter view can be mapped by dimension reduction onto the horizontal and the vertical dimensions in the two-dimensional perceptual mapping space; and (2) consumers’ perception of and evaluation on form differences can be interpreted by three types of form design features, which include the local feature in rear view, the local features in side view, and the overall transitional features between the rear and side of passenger car form.