In order to accurately evaluate the interior noise, a sound quality evaluation method of interior noise based on time-frequency energy characteristics is proposed. First, the noise signal is adaptively decomposed by variational modal decomposition, and a series of intrinsic modal function components are obtained. Then, the instantaneous intensity and weighted energy of each component are obtained through Hilbert transform, which are used as the time-frequency energy characteristics of the noise signal. On this basis, a sound quality evaluation model based on genetic algorithm optimal back propagation (GA-BP) neural network is established with the time-frequency energy characteristics and the psychoacoustic parameters as the input. The proposed method is used to evaluate the interior noise of a vehicle. The correlation between the results and the subjective evaluation results reach 93. 7%, and the relative error is less than 8. 0%, which accurately reflects the sound quality of the vehicle interior noise. The proposed method enjoys a high accuracy and has a good application prospect in the practice of vehicle sound quality development.