After reviewing the theory behind "pressure-velocity based" or PU-based PCA (panel contribution analysis), this article reported in detail an application of this technique to a Plate-Box system and to a vehicle front-of-dash. The main purpose of this first applications consisted in exploring the fundamentals of the technique, to evaluate its potential in relation to automotive applications. All results indicate that the technique has a lot of potential and that there are very good chances to apply it also to real industrial automotive cases. In all cases, good results were obtained in the reconstruction of the SPL (sound pressure level) at the receiver microphone and in the contribution analysis relative to different sub-areas of the radiating structure (plate or dash). For the case of the dash, the simple PCA exercise carried out relative to the dash upper right region showed how the technique seems to be able to "detect" and to wellpredict also small contributions. This fact is very relevant since in "real-life applications" it seldom happens that there is just one dominant contribution. In most PCA methods published so far, this issue was neglected. It turned out that - in general at least - it is necessary to consider both terms for a proper reconstruction of the SPL at a receiver position. In general, the first term tends to be more relevant in the mid-low frequency range and the second term tends to drive the reconstruction in the high frequency range. The frequency dependency of the relative importance of these two terms might depend from case to case, though. Furthermore, the dependence of the reconstruction results on the size of the measurement mesh was also investigated. In general, it appears clear that when the "halfwavelength rule" is respected -i.e. at least two measurement points per wavelength- reconstruction results are satisfactory. In some situations, though, very sensible results were obtained also for frequencies higher than the limit set by this rule. This happened both for the case of the trimmed plate and for the case of the dash. So, it could be that the "half-wavelength rule" tends to be conservative for the type of reconstruction procedure applied by the PU-based PCA. As a matter of fact, this procedure takes place fully in the spatial domain and it does not make any use of wave-number transform and, as a consequence of this, the "half-wavelength" rule represents in this case just a kind of guideline and not a strict mathematical requirement. The last point that was tackled consisted in verifying that it is possible to get acceptable results for the simulation of the trim applied on the radiating structure by means of a technique that allows such simulation in a very short time. For the moment, these latter analyses were limited to the case of the plate-box system. In this case, though, results are quite promising. For both the type of acoustic trim analyzed (foam and foam with heavy layer on top) the simulated IL correlates well with the measured one up to almost 2 kHz) and the time taken for the simulations is more than reasonable. At this point it will be necessary to generalize the simulation technique and to validate it also for the case of the dash. This will be the next step in the development of the methodology.