Vehicle Area Treatments

Treat vehicle doors to block traffic noise and wheel and engine noise entering through their front and rear edges. In addition to reducing noise levels, treated doors improve the performance of stock or aftermarket door mounted speakers and sound like they belong on a luxury car when you open and close them.

Where the rear doors would be on a sedan.  Subject to the same noise sources.Since most involve the rear wheel wells, wheel/tire noise can be a significant factor.

Several factors need to considered when devising a plan for a vehicle trunk . Lets go through them.

Huge for tire/wheel and exhaust noise. This is the first treatment for exhaust noise.

Quarter panels and wheel wells come into play for traffic, exhaust, rear wheel and air turbulence noise. Your treatment plan may be influenced by your trunk strategy, but these noise sources are worth considering under any circumsatance.

Rattles are the biggest issue. A large tailgate could certainly be an entry point for exhaust noise. Rattles tend to involve components inside the trunk lid, hatch door or tailgate. As always, rattles need to be hunted down individually.

This is the big one – tire, engine and exhaust noise. Everything below the vehicle. You're making a commitment to get to the floor, but significant noise reduction requires it.

Treating the floor will reduce overall noise levels more than any other single treatment.

It's under the back seat. The seat cushion helps but it helps more to continue the barrier under it.

I always want to treat the roof. If there's a sunroof, it’s slightly less critical, still almost always worth doing. The roof is a large, often highly resonant panel, directly above your head.

If a sudden rain storm scares you - treat the roof.

If wind noise from the roof annoys you - treat the roof.

If you want to take advantage of the best place in a vehicle to use an absorber - treat the roof.

There may be hope!

If your trunk strategy is isolating the trunk from the passenger compartment, you’ll want to add a barrier here, if you can. Otherwise, rattles are probably the problem – usually when playing music, even a stock system at moderate levels.

This is usually going to be the back wall in a pickup but it could be in a 2-seater or even the back wall of a trunk - the vertical surface above the rear bumper. 

For any vehicle but a pickup, especially a vehicle with a sub-woofer in it, rear license plate rattle is going to be a problem. The fix is so simple that it doesn’t make sense not to do it routinely.