Conference article

The front grill is one of the most important parts on the automobile front design, and it is of significance for automobile manufactures to understand consumers’ visual preference for its design. Our purpose is to produce front grill panels that are more attractive for local consumers. In this paper, the structures of visual impression in observing the front grills of Sport Utility Vehicles (SUVs) and pickup trucks were investigated by using many adjectives and comparison was made between Japanese and Thai consumers. Thirteen different front grills were chosen from the best-selling automobile brands in the world as experimental stimuli. Semantic Differential (SD) method was used to quantify visual impression, and twenty-one pairs of antonym adjectives such as ‘glossy’ and ‘matte’ were selected from the result of our previous investigation. Approximately two hundred people participated from Japan and Thailand in total. SD data from the two nations were analyzed by Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and it was clear that the structure of visual impression for a car front grill was different between Japanese and Thais, in particular, the most important principal components were ‘luxuries feel’ and ‘sharpness’ for Japanese, whereas ‘stylishness’ and ‘lightness’ for Thais. The relationship among adjectives on the first and second principal component diagram was also different between the two nations. After connecting these results with morphological features, it will be useful for manufactures to propose the more attractive products that match the preference of local consumers.

Car front grill, visual impression, comparison by nationalities, principal component analysis