Gadgetory

rip-snorting around in the newest Mustang show top tech from BMWs new top ride and do speed cameras have a place it's time to check the tech PC cars differently we love them on the road and under the hood but also check the tech and are known for telling it like it is ugly is included at no extra cost the good the bad the bottom line this is CNET on cars welcome to see net on cars the show all about high tech cars and modern driving i'm brian coulis well the first special performance edition of the new 2016 mustang is here the mustang shelby gt350 and gt350r the performance cars today can't just do brawn well they've got to nail finesse as well let's see if ford got it right in that balance as we drive the new Shelby's and check the tech huh 1966 popular mechanics in the drive-in with Dan section Walter Eastman writes in to ask Dan Gurney what's the best all-round Street track sports car you've ever driven to which gurney simply replies a gt350 Mustang guess what we've got with us today let's see if gurney would be just as simple and just as positive in his endorsement gord Green gun almost every part of a Mustang to create the gt350 one of the most obvious changes you can spot from the outside is the whole front clip see they pushed out the front track on the wheels almost an inch and a half as a result the bodywork has to reach out to cover it you've got different fenders and a different hood than on any other Mustang now on top of the GT 350 you've also got the very rare our model only two seats they lose the back carbon fiber wheels extraordinarily unusual a magnetorheological adaptive suspension of standard on the are optional on the 350 and ideally you order it the right way no radio no air conditioning no rear carpet you can spot one by the red grill badge now we've seen the insides of the new Mustang before nothing dramatically different there a couple of additional gauges three choices of gearbox for the rear wheel drive six-speed manual manual six feet or six on the floor learn to drive it that's your only choice here in the head unit you can have a basic display radio like we have here or you can go all the way up to their latest sync three touchscreen system or all the way down to a stripped are as I mentioned with nothing there no radio no a/c and here's your drive mode selector on the steering wheel other Mustangs put it as a toggle down here it's able to harness all these different drive modes you see on the dash but unlike other Mustangs it can also roll in an adaptive suspension as part of its mix this is the first Ford ever to have that now when you get a 350 or 350 are you got the same mill a 5.2 liter naturally aspirated v8 no turbo no blow or nothing like that 526 horsepower that's nearly a hundred and two horsepower per liter a number called specific output and in this case it's the highest one for its ever posted without a turbo or a blower in phone the redline is 8250 peak horsepower occurs near they compare this to a Camaro z28 which uses a much larger 7 liter engine to get a lower 505 horse and only 72 horse per liter though it does make more torque and it uses technologies like low friction design for internal resistance free breathing heads and bow lots of lightning they took away as much weight as they could we've heard all that before to be honest but you probably haven't heard before is deep in the heart something called a flat plane crank a crankshaft has counter weights at 90 degrees offset what a flat plane crank does is changes that 90 degree to 180 degrees the engine buyers from bank to bank and you get better exhaust scavenging so one cylinder doesn't disrupt the flow of the next cylinder some sale it's a flat plane Craig may be it's going to sound like a Ferrari oh yeah like a Ferrari in a denim jacket with a bar over I've done well Oh about this vehicle that I noticed immediately as it is the godson 3:02 my favorite modern Mustang ever light crisp muscular but not steroidal that's my kind of Mustang utterly and completely drivable every day some people are gonna find it not hard-edged enough not feeling special enough consider them to be purists without a cause now I focus on the gt350 in this story today because it's going to be a lot more accessible VR is going to be extraordinarily low production as far as we can tell and the 350 does most of what you want at a nice price psychologically comes in under 50 grand with delivery but then you've got this very difficult decision to make you can get the track package for 6500 which get you the adaptive suspension heavy-duty front Springs the drive control a spoiler in the rear a tower brace and heavy duty coolers or the tech package which also gets you adaptive suspension heavy Springs and drive control but then adds infotainment like a better audio system sync 3 power seats and voice operated nav 7500 for that if you're curious and are adds about 13 5 to either configuration I've got a tech package and that gets you to about 56 - out the door that's a pretty good value for a car that has such track prowess and such nice street manners which is becoming the theme in the high-performance market from McLaren to challengers to Camaros most cars that are super brawny realize they also have to have clean fingernails check out the rest of our experience with the new Shelby's at Laguna Seca Raceway it was quite a day over at cars cnet.com well what's the only thing more hated than a red-light camera it's got to be a speed camera but what if they work and are improving public safety it's an interesting question to ponder we'll do that for the smarter driver when CNET on cars returns the simplest kind of speed camera is basically a radar gun on a stick but those are easy for the speeder to beat slow down for a few hundred yards and then pick it up again so the new trend in u.s. speed cameras may soon be corridor averaging with ALPR cameras those are automatic license plate recognition now if you're one of our UK viewers none of this is new to you having debuted back in Scotland in 2004 here's how corridor averaging in a LPR is used a camera recognizes your car's license plate at one point on the road as you drive down the road further additional cameras recognize your plate again and again and record at each time with a time standard since the distance between those cameras and the times at which they spotted you is known a little simple math results in an average speed and potentially a ticket one of the first major u.s. tests of corridor averaging with a LPR was in Montgomery County Maryland which added the tech to its standard speed cameras in 2012 the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has since used it as a study base and just released a few numbers they estimate these cameras generated about a 30% decrease in fatalities and serious injuries that would mean 21,000 fewer deaths and serious injuries if this was used nationwide and that in Montgomery County fatalities and serious injuries fell 27% even on nearby roads where these cameras weren't specifically being used a spillover effect because I know you're wondering Montgomery County posts the location of all of its speed cameras on a County webpage they're moved regular and you can be sure that drivers share those locations on crowdsource NAV apps like Waze and there is of course a vigorous debate as to whether some municipalities sneakily deploy traffic cams to generate more revenue than speed reductions and in some states notably California this corridor averaging license plate camera technology is expressly prohibited as a speed trap for now at least it pays to double check what kind of speed cameras are in use where you travel and not give them a reason to notice you at all welcome back to see net on cars coming to you from our home at the Mount Tam Motor Club just north of the Golden Gate Bridge a lot of cars actually use atkinson cycle engines you just wouldn't know it I guess lean-burn doesn't make for a sexy a badge as turbo or 5.0 and notice most cars with an Atkinson are hybrids as the technologies dovetail with a mission of efficiency above sheer power here's how it all works an Ekans an engine basically one takes in a little less fuel and two brings the most out of it but three at a sacrifice of raw horsepower when a given piston in an act instant engine has completed its intake stroke and begins to compress the charge of air and fuel it leaves the intake valve open for a bit creating a sort of leak and thereby reducing the amount of air fuel charged in the cylinder unchanged is the duration of the combustion or power stroke thereby giving the engine all the time it needs to fully burn the smaller charge it ignited the downside is less air and fuel going in means less power coming out when you ignite it all but you spend proportionally less fuel on your overall power since most Atkinson cars are hybrids so what the engine lacks in oh the electric motor more than makes up now why is it called an Atkins in' cycle that's because it was invented by a guy named Atkinson in the late 1800s a British engineer back then there was no variable valve timing as we've discussed so he literally had to vary the travel length of each piston cycle with a combination of wonky linkages you should be pretty glad we're not dealing with today in a moment your email when your breaks are your enemy and reason number six thousand two hundred seventy one why manual transmissions aren't coming back when CNET on cars continues we have known it was coming for a long time but Bentley have finally officially lifted the covers on Ben Tiger the first foray by the British luxury manufacturer into the world of SUVs Ben Tiger one stout luxury and perform the likes of the Range Rover and the Porsche Cayenne and to achieve that it's going to have to come out swinging buy more from the ex car team of CNET UK at cnet.com slash welcome back to see net on cars I'm Brian Cooley here's the part of the show where I take a few of your emails first one comes in from zayeed R who says my question is why would aggressive braking cause extra fuel consumption it is kind of a non-intuitive connection isn't it well as I eat the thing about braking the wrong way is that you kill momentum momentum that you spent precious fuel to create in your car that's how you get the car going forward they don't throw it away but when you jump on the brakes non judiciously first thing you do is you convert a lot of motion that you want into heat that doesn't do you any good and you also create a lot of brake dust I mean these are kind of useless byproducts of using your brakes too hard too late too much now on top of that remember that 70% of the fuel in the average gas engine car for example is creating heat not motion its enormous ly wasteful so don't add to it by braking badly the way to do it is what hyper miles know well folks that can get up to a hundred miles per gallon out of a Prius they look way down the road and read the situation to accelerate very gradually and to brake very gradually and do the least amount of both so you're not constantly scrubbing off speed and then dumping fuel in the engine to get speed back that real lumpy driving kills fuel economy so interestingly enough paying attention to way down the road raises your mpg and be easy on the brakes but don't be dangerous Brad from Miami writes in and says when will you be airing that video you promised showing us how to drop a McNeal transmission you know a little late on that one I have some friends that would like to learn also is there any data you know of on texting and driving in an automatic versus a car with a manual transmission well first of all you're right we're overdue on getting you that how-to video on how to drive a manual gearbox I'm looking for just the right victim a student and also the right manual transmission car a lot of the ones we've had in are extremely high performance and I'm not going to do that to a first-time clutch driver but we're on it now your other questions interesting I know of one study from the University of Virginia that looked at the relationship between attention paid to draw with a stick versus an automatic and they found generally speaking with adolescent boys who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that they paid more attention to driving when they had a manual gearbox in the simulator kept them more focused now that's not directly related to keeping your mind on driving versus holding your phone but it seems to go down the same Road let's face it you can't steer and shift and juggle your phone when you only have two hands but you know how we are that's why we have knees to take over the steering wheel I'm afraid so none of this even if we found that it's the holy grail of reducing texting while driving is going to save the stick I'm afraid the manual gearbox is suffering a death of a thousand cuts or already has for a variety of reasons first of all is fuel economy modern automatic transmissions can be programmed by the manufacturer to seek the most efficient gear combination with the engine load and RPM that's how you get the most fuel out of a powertrain along the same lines emission goals are getting ever more stringent and again being able to program the gearbox gives the manufacturer one more tool they can use to bring down emissions the most it's just part of an ecosystem in the car that is smart and finally convenience most of us just don't want a baby a clutch and a stick especially in our average driving up and down the freeway and congested traffic it reads better than it lives I know there are diehards out there but the sticks not coming back it will remain kind of like vinyl a very popular enthusiast minority choice I've never done a top five about a single car before but I'm about to do one now because the new BMW 7-series has so many new technologies and it's new for it and to some degree new for the auto industry certainly in mainstream production that it deserves that kind of a look it also is interesting indicator some people have a theory that the German premium car makers are getting a little nervous that companies like Tesla in particular are beginning to steal their thunder as the go-to car for affluent tech-savvy buyers so let's see how the BMW 7 answers that particular appetite with the top 5 technologies you'll find within it number five the carbon core now I put this at number five because it is not an entirely new technology carbon fiber in cars but pure carbon fiber passenger cells remain a tedious expensive process but BMWs done here is hybridized with carbon fiber reinforced plastic here and here and here blended with aluminum and lightweight high-strength steel the overall result is a loss of nearly two hundred pounds now on a big boy like this that's not exactly earth-shaking but weight loss is the Holy Grail and this is an important way of getting there by the way this technology trickled down from the iSeries the i3 and the i8 where it emerged a couple years ago number four Laser headlights and I put these relatively low because this is not entirely new technology howdy got these out in a limited-production r8 a little while ago but this is full production in the seventh series contrary to what you might think Laser headlights don't literally aim out on the road like lasers at a concert they go about an inch and they hit an illumination structure inside the lamp and then that light is projected out but you end up with a much more efficient and controllable light huge throw they say about a third of a mile for these guys that's way more than your current high beams while using about a third less power they're very tiny modules and they should last forever unless your rear end someone don't do that number three is gesture control now a BMW gives you a lot of ways to control the center stack you've got the traditional I drive knob controller which lately has had a touchpad on top of that voice command continues better than before you've got a touchscreen now I'm still getting used to that in a premium German car that was very no-no for the last number of years but now on the top of all that is gesture command as well this is the biggest mainstream push to put gesture in real cars yet number two is the head-up display not you may say HUDs nothing new and it's not but this is the largest one in the business and that's important in a hood because the bigger and more expansive it is the less you have to scrutinize a small piece of real estate which is not a great idea when you're driving you want big one that is more or less in your gaze and this one's absolutely doing that on top of that BMW already in my opinion did the best infographics on a hood of anybody in the industry what I want to see them push the bar on next is be the first to get augmented reality in here number one in the words of auric Goldfinger is what an extraordinary car key you have Mr Bond this is the first LCD touchscreen remote key fob now you slide it up to get to your screens and you can see if the cars lock you can check your fuel range check your battery charge if you happen to have a plug-in hybrid or something but here's where it gets really interesting on the last screen it marries into a new level of self-parking tech so you hit this button here the car goes and identifies a nearby parking space it shows you yes I have found one they need a stand on this arrow and the car will start to nose in all by itself you aren't in the car notice that that's also a Deadman switch if I lift off the car stops moving for safety reasons otherwise I just stay on the arrow and the car takes itself all the way in and when it's done it tells me and all I have to do is turn it off and it locks and I walk away that's a crowd pleaser thanks for watching hope you enjoyed this episode keep those emails coming it's on cars at cnet.com and if you follow me on twitter you'll know ahead of time what we're shooting next it's Bryan Cooley very simple I'll see you next time we check the tech Oh