Ride Quality of Passenger Cars: A Comprehensive Review of Emerging Technologies, Intelligent Systems, and Future Directions

Ride quality—encompassing vehicle comfort, vibration isolation, and noise, vibration, and harshness (NVH)—has become a key competitive differentiator in modern automobiles. This paper presents a comprehensive update to the foundational literature on passenger car ride quality, capturing the rapidly growing literature and new technological paradigms that have emerged over the past decade. Established approaches to human vibration response, vehicle dynamics modelling, and road surface characterisation are examined within the ISO 2631 framework. This review critically surveys advances driven by battery electric vehicle (BEV) powertrains—where the absence of internal combustion engine noise unmasks motor whine, inverter switching noise, and tyre–road excitation, lowering the perceptual ride–NVH boundary from ~25 Hz toward 15–18 Hz—as well as intelligent semi-active and active suspension technologies, deep reinforcement learning for suspension control, machine learning for ride quality prediction, and connected vehicle infrastructure enabling predictive preview control. Key research gaps are identified: the absence of validated ISO 2631 frequency weightings for autonomous vehicle postures, the lack of standardised open benchmark datasets for cross-study comparison, and the unresolved sim-to-real validation gap for data-driven suspension controllers. Ten priority research directions are proposed for the coming decade.