Gadgetory

the littlest Jeep arrives and from Italy the results are in on automatic braking technology and what capacitors are about to modernize under your hood it's time to check the tech EC 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 CNET on cars to show all about high-tech cars and modern driving i'm brian coulis well deep sales have been on a tear the last couple of years nicely timed with a lineup that emphasizes SUVs and crossovers right about the time americans rush back to them post recession and post soaring fuel prices but to my eye the most interesting story coming out of jeep happens to be on the small end the little almost pocketable renegade let's drive this italian jeep and check the tech the new Jeep renegade has the undeniable appeal of a Hot Wheels car it's cool compact and craveable and we have the top-of-the-line the trailhawk let's check the tech when I saw this Jeep renegade get unveiled at the Geneva Motor Show back in 2014 I was pretty sure we were looking at a free quarter scale mock-up so they could get it to fit up on the stand there this actually shares a platform with the Fiat 500x it's a subcompact but with real all-wheel drive as its passport into this very busy sector of the auto bills these renegades are made right alongside Fiat at an FCA plant in Melfi Italy in a sense you're getting an American icon and an Italian car for under 30 grand can't do that with a Pantera now inside the renegade I get the feel if they're trying to emphasize its cheapest to take your mind off its Italian this and its smallness the Jeep stick is everywhere it's here it's here it's here and it's there there are several available you connect head units on the renegade ours is an upscale six and a half inch touchscreen also voice driven we've seen and liked this guy before mostly for its simple almost cartoony interface it's got highly rated easy-to-use Garmin navigation there a handful of familiar apps you can load if the App Store itself ever loads and a Wi-Fi hotspot can be configured in this car as will an interesting sunroof option called my sky it powers back like most but then you can also pop out the front and/or rear panels entirely to get a really big hole obstructed however by a structural bar under the hood our high trim trailhawk version has the big engine and even that's only 2.4 liters and four cylinders does 180 horsepower and 175 pound feet of torque through a 9 speed automatic only average mpg is 24 in addition to blind spot technology you can also option a renegade with forward collision technology that will actively brake for you an active Lane Departure technology that will steer you back in your lane those are unusual in this class on the road I'm afraid to report now the drive behavior of this powertrain is rubbery and loopy they made a 2.4 feel like a 1.4 I made a 9 speed automatic feel like a CVT but neither of those is ahead of course on the positive side we have real all-wheel drive underneath including on this particular renegade a 20 to 1 crawl mode of course you've got all-wheel drive lock you've got real low range and it's got a different approach departure skid pans front rear even bright red tones this is a serious off-road er not just an all-wheel drive vehicle it's of note that even a 4x4 renegade like this can be a true front-wheel drive vehicle unless you need all four driven it physically disconnects the rear drive until needed all in interest of less drag and better fuel economy now under our renegade we have the first use of Kony's frequency selective damping shocks these mechanically change their firmness based on the frequency of the inputs coming up through the wheels that way they'll be ideal for handling on smooth roads but be more comfortable and forgiving on bad ones all without expensive electronic adaptive suspension I found the handling on smooth corners was quite good the ride quality on choppy pavement was kind of choppy in some the renegade looks great drives like hell but that's not gonna hurt its sales prospects it's entering just about the hottest category in the US auto market and it's in chic find our full review on that new Jeep renegade all new models receive at cars Dakshina dot-com one of the most interesting pieces of self-driving technology is already here is the ability of many cars to automatically brake when they detect a collision that maybe you don't detect saving your bacon and directly adding to the bottom line of safety on the road but how well does it really work we have some early answers for the smarter drivers you would see that on cards in everyday driving nothing is more fundamental to avoiding a collision than stopping before you have one but too often humans are well you and don't brake in time or at all that's where forward collision avoidance technology comes in and ideally appears in cars we really buy not just as a pricey option on pricey ones the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety has been watching forward collision technology come down to earth in three flavors there's the warning warning you of a forward collision pre charging the brakes before a collision to increase their effectiveness when you do get on them if it detects a high risk of impact the system will prime the brakes to help you stop more quickly and automatic braking so the car will pull itself partially or fully to a stop even if you drop the ball and there's the auto brake vehicle stop by itself just two years ago nearly three-quarters of new cars didn't offer any kind of forward collision tech just two model years later the number lacking it is down to under half though just four percent of models offer it standard of a variety of cars that offer this tech ten models from Acura BMW Mazda and Chrysler earned a superior rating with five or six out of six points a separate study by the highway loss data Institute found that two models of Volvo's from 2010 to 2012 with automatic braking had insurance claim rates that were 15 to 16 percent lower and the latest Volvo's offer the first automatic braking that will intervene if you're about to make a very ill-advised left turn against traffic it pays to double check if your next car offers forward collision tech what if any degree of self braking it includes and how well the whole system is rated to actually work it's a fundamental feature that could pay for itself pretty easily the first time you don't rear-end some 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 most electricity stored in your car today is either in its 12-volt battery that runs the starter lights and ignition or in a big motive battery if your car is an Eevee or a plug-in hybrid but there is another way in a capacitor capacitors are caps store electricity like batteries but differing in four major ways first they charge really fast second they discharge or deliver electricity really fast both of those behaviors because unlike your car's battery capacitor store electricity as electricity not as a chemical soup that contains electric potential thirdly caps are light no LED plates and acid solution and fourth they laugh at extreme weather but traditionally one big downside has kept capacitors out of a car's powertrain and that is low energy density capacitors have usually held a small fraction of the energy found in a car battery and took up a lot of space to do that enter ultra capacitors these have a much higher energy density so they can do more work and yet still fit inside today's tight engine bays and other locations and their time seems to have arrived on the coattails of new car tech like automatic start/stop electronic adaptive suspension and electric turbos each of those demand a lot of new current that is delivered in as little as milliseconds yet to preserve efficiency want their power source to be recharged easily capacitors have that written all over them Toyota's Supra hvr hybrid race car used a super cap in its powertrain to store power for an electric boost motor and doing so it won the tokachi 24 hour race in 2007 a capacitor which is like a battery but charges in seconds more down-to-earth Mazdas oddly named ie loop tech in their cars today uses a capacitor but not to drive the car in their case they use it to power accessories and that takes load off the traditional harder to charge lead acid battery ie loop uses a special alternator that freewheels when the engine moves the car but the moment you let off the gas it wakes up to turn outgoing energy into electricity capacitors themselves are nothing new but super capacitors being found under the hood likely will be in a moment your email how to survive a rollover with technology and nitrogen or air in your time when CNET on cars returns you the Panamera has everything in it I want from a Porsche it's got performance handling power and yes the looks as well but on top of that it's got roof my kids in the back and all the luggage we could possibly throw at it this is the Porsche for the real world buy more from the ex car team of CNET UK @c Netcom /s car welcome back to C net on car so I'm Brian Cooley it's that time in the show when I take a few of your emails first one I've got here is coming up from Hari who has a question about nitrogen inflation of tires he asked what difference does it make in fuel economy and mileage the life of the tire and the ride quality of the car if you fill your tyres with nitrogen instead of the more commonly available and universally used atmospheric air well are even nitrogen entire thing comes down to two fundamental differences from air the first is larger molecules and this means the nitrogen molecule is just bigger than the molecules of air you get at the standard pump those larger molecules have a harder time escaping through the microporosity the slight leakage that every rubber tire has especially old tires that means they hold their pressure longer without you having to refill them the other key things is that nitrogen has less moisture it's almost absolutely dry what happens with regular air in your tires is as you drive the tire eats up from friction and deforming all the time that causes the moisture in the air to expand of course and that causes the tires overall pressure to go up then when you park on the tire gets cold it goes back down you're always doing this with tire pressure nitrogen doesn't really have that problem it's very stable on tire pressure and that consistent pressure is good because you want to maintain an optimal rolling resistance to get better fuel economy and at the tire handle and deform the way it's designed to now reality check this is not a really big deal the amount of change in pressure from that moisture and regular air has been factored in for ages by manufacturers and tire makers that's why you get this thing called cold si it tells you where to inflate your tires when they are cold and have not been driven a lot that freeway speeds for example as far as those larger molecules escaping it's definitely a bonus but air escapes very slowly in modern tires wheels valves and valve stems it's not something you can't keep on top of by merely checking your tires once a month that's all you've got to do once a quarter we'll probably do it actually and therefore my recommendation on nitrogen is this if you get new tires and they put it in great if you've got an easy cheap source to keep adding it I guess that's worth it but otherwise I would just invest in a tire gauge and check your tires just occasionally and you'll be absolutely fine now it is important to keep your tires at the right pressure though if you have a 25% drop entire pressure it equals over 16% increased rolling resistance that's substantial also an under inflated tire gets a lot hotter when it's driving than one that's properly inflated and that causes more yo-yo effect of the pressure in the tire that fatigues the tire sooner and an under inflated tire is dangerous when it comes to vehicle stability on the road so keep those tires pumped up at the right pressure but you don't need nitrogen to get any of this done Tomas de writes in with a question about an accident he was in recently and technology that could have made it a little less grisly he says I was a passenger in a car involved in a rollover crash due to the seat belt I sustained compression fractures in my spine and says he had a broken sternum as well I went back he says to examine the car before they crushed it and it appeared as though the back tire was also under inflated which could have contributed to the flip I seem to recall on your show seeing a technology that allowed the seat to absorb some of the impact taken by pushing down in the seat during certain kinds of accidents and he wants to know what that technology was well first of all Thomas you're thinking about a Volvo technology we covered recently in their new SUV and this has got the kind of odd awkward name of run off-road protection it uses a compressible structure in the bottom of the seat so that when a car leaves the road and lands hard perhaps on a lower plane or on any other surface that the seat will crush down toward the floor taking that force that normally would be offloaded to your spine as you know all too well it also has a technology that snugs up the belt in the milliseconds of the impact keeping you from a any slop to the belt you may have had a situation in your crash where the belt was a little loose it locked and then you slammed against it that often can cause chest injuries helicopter seats have done something similar to what Volvo is doing they've done that for decades where they had this variable crush zone underneath they do with elaborate shock absorbers and levers because sometimes helicopter is coming on hard landings especially when they auto rotate now you told me in the subsequent email you were in a 2007 model year car I'm not going to get into the make and model of it cuz I don't think it's actually germane to the discussion but I do want to point out three model year milestones everyone should be aware of three things that happen starting with 2007 cars in the US were required to have TPMS the tire pressure monitoring system that means that the tires and wheels monitor their pressure and record it in to a small display somewhere on the instrument panel that's US law in 2009 we got the requirement of new rollover standards vehicles went from having to take one and a half times their own weight on their roof to surviving three times their own weight on their roof that's a big difference in keeping that vehicle a safe cocoon around you in a rollover accident like you were in and the third thing I want to call out is 2012 was the milestone when electronic stability control became required on all new US cars now it was very common before that but required as of 2012 these three to me sort of draw a line in the sand of late-model used cars where I'm gonna make sure I've got all three of those which pushes me out to around 2010 or later to get a car that's really loaded up on these critical technologies especially for the kind of accident you were in thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed this episode appreciate your emails in particular keep those coming it's on cars at cnet.com I'll see you next time we check the down you you