The normal transmission characteristics of sound are hardly obtained due to the various noises and structural factors in a running car environment. It is due to the channel distortion of the original source sound recorded by microphones, and it seriously degrades the performance of the speech recognition in real driving environments. In this paper we analyze the degree of intelligibility under the various sound distortion environments by channels according to driving speed with respect to speech transmission index(STI) and compare the STI with rates of speech recognition. We examine the correlation between measures of intelligibility depending on sound pick-up patterns and performance in speech recognition. Thereby we consider the optimal location of a microphone in single channel environment. In experimentation we find that high correlation is obtained between STI and rates of speech recognition.