Can The Sound Proofing in the Toyota Alphard Be Improved?

It has been a while I met with a fellow Toyota Alphard owner in person. I seen a lot of giants on the road around my area but it is just like another car on the road that you gave a glance but never come into contact.

The last time I met with a reader in person is to help him to look for his giant.

Last weekend I met up with anohter of my reader of this blog in a secluded place.

The place is just nice to have a private chat on our giant without anyone bothering us. The shade is just right to protect us from the hot sun.

The meeting was arrange impromptu as this reader was asking me through email what can he do to improve the sound proofing of his gaint. He recently acquired a '06 AS and he found that he can hear quite clearly a lot of noise from passing vehicle or motorbike either in low speed or high speed.

Since I don't faced such a problem I thought it would be better to meet up and then check out his AS. At least we can compare note as both of us are driving the NFL model.

Well we had a very pleasant chat on everything Alphard. Being new to his car he has a lot of questions and I tried my best to answered them. Both of us drove each other giant and we concluded that his giant sound proofing is not as good as mine.

I did check the rubbers on al the doors and they look ok to me.Other than the noisy tires that he had I couldn't find out why his giant is slightly less sound proofed than mine. After a long discussion, we concluded that one possibility if that the source of the intruding noise could be coming from the privacy glass.

His privacy glass was taken out to do the Puspakom inspection and then later was sent for tinting before refitted back to the giant. There might be some gaps that are not properly sealed that cause the external noise intruding into the interior. Still this is only our speculation and we can only ascertain if he goes back to ask his dealer to look into the fitting of the privacy glasses.

Another annoying thing he pointed out to me is that whenever the giant is going over rough patches of road, the rear seats will be making a lot of rattling noise. He think that his previous Toyota Vios has less rattling noise than his giant.

Well this is expected since the rear seats are sitting on the rail track so there is always some free movement hence the rattling noise. There is a common problem where the clips holding the base of the third row seats can come loose hence causing consistent rattling noise when the car is on the move. I sat at the back row and didn't find anything unusual. The seats on a sedan is permanently fixed to the floor so the chance of it moving and making rattling noise is very rare.

There are some shops that does special rubber lining for the doors and boot to reduce the intrusion of external noise coming into the car. However I feel that unless it is absolutely necessary no point spending the extra money just to get a little improvement.
We spent quite a bit of time checking out the features in each other giant. I let him audition my ICE setup and planted a bit of "poison" to him on ICEing his giant!

One interesting note is that this reader is really following my blog to the dots. He even show me his printout of all my blog posts that is relevant to him and binded them into a (so-called) maintenance manual. I really appreciate his patient and passion in doing that.