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the hottest Range Rover yet what frightens you the most about self-driving cars and a new run at technology to keep kids from being forgotten it's time to check the 10 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 C net on cars welcome to C net on cars the show all about high tech cars and modern driving I'm Brian Cooley well hot SUVs are a real credible category these days and Land Rovers just decided to get credible within it not just with a fast new truck but a whole fast new division behind it let's learn about SVR and check the tech you know you're in trouble when a new model comes to market raving about its lap time around the Nurburgring that most enduring of irrelevance II is to the average car buyer this one does exactly that but also a lot more let's drive this all-new 15 Land Rover Sport SVR check the tech the key thing to bear in mind about a Range Rover Sport is that it's not the sport version of a Range Rover a Range Rover Sport is its own distinct model and it carries some of the design cues from the Evoque particularly what they call this diminishing diello it's the side windows that get narrower as you go to the back of the card when car makers make a hotter car they always give it a more aggressive chin with bigger holes in it to get air in different wheels you get some lower body cladding here and out back you got four exhaust pipes that are very nicely chiseled and what they call a splitter for airflow management down the middle this is the first of a new line of cars from land rover that are kind of like BMW M if you will they come from the special vehicle operation of Land Rover but Ford already has a trademark on SVO so their s vo is badge SVR now Range Rover for that matter Land Rover interiors I'm always struck me as some of the most handsome it's a great layout Urgo is good handsomeness is everywhere I could do without this two-tone stuff you also notice we have pseudo sport pseudo racing seats in both the front row and in the back row because those immovable headrests are always there it can make it a little hard to put the back seats down so that's a bit of a sacrifice for sport pretension versus practicality and as you can see the fold flat is kind of pseudo flat this is not optimized for cargo nor is there a third row available and we've seen this head unit before in jag Land Rover products it's a unique interface to them one of my biggest gripes is the slowness of its touchscreen response and the fact that you have to do voice input of navigation destinations in little itty bitty pieces two three five two three I mean just compare how fast it is to tell your phone to take you somewhere and to tell this thing to do so ok Google Drive to 235 second Street San Francisco California my third gripe is how many screens interrupt what you're seeing here I can't say how many warning or notification screens like God could just blot out what's on the main screen that I care about and even when I turn the volume knob after a moment or two it brings up a confirmation screen that I don't need my ears tell me how loud it is that just gets in the way of what I care about and again overlaying all of this is so much lag and delay it's not measured in seconds parts of seconds but that's not okay in a car much brighter spot is up here in the upper left in control apps now here's where you get an apps platform you can decide what you want on which of these screens very much like you do on your phone or your tablet and it's all managed here through the jag in control apps app on your phone that is very much a projector app to get things here up here but obviously not your whole phone their own curated basket the apps all come from this control panel on your phone you've got some new ones that are called out here like RTO and glimpse are apparently recent you can add cynic navigation if you don't like what Land Rover's got as well as a few other apps most of which aren't exactly globally famous and then down here you can see the ones I do have installed like Parker pedia stitcher are do and this is where you set up the layout of your apps on the car these are flip through screens on the vehicle I mock them up here first and then they get pushed out to the car now the cameras on this vehicle are interesting you've got a variety of views and settings parked right now I've got the junction view I also have a curb view that looks out to the sides off the front wings I can set up new combinations of cameras that you don't see on any other car so they're very camera centric on this vehicle too bad that camera in the rear at least is so awful but it's so bad I'm pretty sure it's defective and I'm not gonna knock it because nobody would ship a camera with that bad registration of colors and fuzziness into a production car now up here in the engine bay is some fairly familiar jag Land Rover stuff a 5 liter supercharged v8 but because you got an SVR badge on it it puts out more 550 horse that's 40 more than without that bad 41 more pound-feet of torque gets you up to 502 and of course it goes up to an 8-speed automatic only but it's a sport automatic with faster shifts and that power is all four wheels either in a trackage mode or in an off-road mode depending where you have your terrain response knob set this vehicles heavy 50 100 pounds despite the extensive use of aluminum still gets up to 60 though and four and a half seconds or better so where do you give on the mpg of course it's rated at only fourteen nineteen but if you're buying a vehicle like this you didn't buy it in a shootout between it three you're the first thing that impressed me as I got into this Range Rover Sport SVR was not what it did when it moved but what it did when it comes to a stop this vehicle has the best auto start/stop technology every it starts the engine almost in the time it takes to lift off the brake pedal that's very nicely done and it helps you get the most out of that pretty poor impeaching the next thing you notice is definitely about going any major car maker right now jag and Land Rover are obsessed with obnoxious exhaust systems and they're fun the power of course is for digis this Sport Automatic as they say is definitely tight it's quick all in the fundamental takeaway I get very this to one of the hot Cayennes or an x5 m is it it's less severe and yet it handles like a very capable car when you press it though I imagine if I went head to head it's not as sharp as those two Germans okay let's price our Range Rover Sport SVR this is not going to be a cheap date as you can imagine all in about 117 3 the way I would do it what they've done here in this category is to hit - I think more bases than their competition it's also a very comfortable daily driver not all the competitors are they can be high-strung and it's got serious off-road cred find our full review on that Land Rover Range Rover Sport SVR a whole mouthful awaiting you at cars cnet.com well you know not everybody is buying this vision of self-driving cars now I happen to think they're in for a surprise but it's important to pay attention to their reservations and the reasons that underlie them that's of interest to the smarter driver when CNET on cars returned we're used to driving we think we're good at it and we don't really trust computers those three things are the main hurdles that stand between a lot of people and buying into the self-driving future the autonomous car that's coming that's not going to stop it from getting here but along the way it will behoove regulators car makers and just about all of us to pay attention to those who maybe need to be brought along a little more researchers Michael sivak and Brandon shut Lee at University of Michigan has some early answers they surveyed 505 adult US drivers in June 2015 to take their temp on vehicle autonomy for attitudes bubbled up autonomy itself the most drivers especially women want no self-driving followed by almost as many who are open to partial self-driving and under 16% interested in fully automated cars at this point the biggest naysayers to full automation where drivers 60 and older just 11 percent of them liked the idea a big problem for policy makers who think autonomy is going to allow older drivers to keep doing so safely longer control we can't yet imagine the steering wheel and pedals going away over 96% of the drivers said keep those century-old controls even if a car is fully self-driving interestingly there was little difference in this response between age groups or gender interface here an almost even split between those who want to tell their self-driving car where to take them by a voice command versus via a touchscreen have these folks tried automotive voice command only 8% of drivers want to use their phone for this task and a quaint 3% thought a keyboard and mouse might work best finally notification for decades we're going to have partial self-driving cars that we'll need to hand it back to us on occasion and clearly we don't want to be surprised over 59% of us want to be alerted via sound and visuals and something vibrating about a fifth said they can do without the vibration part maybe they've tried one of those Cadillacs that already has an odd vibrating alert seat so it all adds up to a reality check and it will pay for car makers and regulators to double check their assumptions about our attitudes around self-driving and some of the details of how we expect it to work rather than assume that we're all going to embrace it in some homogenous fashion 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 well all those years and all those headlines and still there's no homerun technical solution to keep kids from dying locked in hot cars but even Flo thinks they might have a way to crack the code on the road to the future it's sort of odd if you think about it your car alerts you when your headlights are left on but not when your kids are left in a trickier problem to solve for of course but also vastly more important you know what a parent is no she's not here oh my god the feds tracked the problem of child fatalities and locked hot cars but many people actually follow the work of meteorologist yon all of San Jose State University in Silicon Valley he call aids media reports and estimates that between 1998 and 2009 494 children about 37 each year died locked in hot cars in the u.s. more than half the kids who die of hyperthermia in cars are 2 years old or younger about half of them were left in the car by accident by a forgetful parent 9 come on where's your emergency we just parked next to a car Walmart Cadillac Escalade ok baby is been in the carrier screaming and knowing around a modern car is unfortunately a very efficient calorimeter of sorts it's seals and insulation are deadly good at trapping solar energy the majority of heating happens in the first 20 minutes or so cracking the windows has almost no effect even flow has a new set of their baby seats out with a technology called sensor safe it's an electronic sensing technology to warn you you've got a child buckled in the seat in the back especially a rear-facing one which is another hazard in and of itself out of sight out of mind now an electronic sensing baby seat is actually not anything new the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration looked at nearly two dozen of these things back in 2012 and decreed most of them junk let's see how Evenflo seeks to break the mold now up here in the front of the car you do a one-time install of this dongle that comes with the sensors safe seat as you can tell by that in this is an obd2 port noggle this goes up underneath your dash now once that's installed that stays there you're not having to take that in and out all the time it works on any car with an obd2 port made since 2008 not since 1996 when obd2 first arrived so you've got to have a later car because that's when they implement it what's called the can protocol an electronic language that that dongle relies on okay now here in the back of the car you install the seat and of course latch it in safely that's a whole different topic get your child in here and then this is the key this is the little sensor safe clip this green thing once you clip this across their chest under armpits and around their legs that locks in now you close the loop as soon as you drive above five miles an hour for more than a few seconds this thing starts transmitting to the receiver we just installed that there's a child in here then the next time you stop and turn off the engine you get a chime instantly reminding you this is buckled around your child in the back don't forget them a lot of experts like this approach better than some of the previous technologies which were proximity-based where once you got far enough away from the car or the seat you then got a warning a lot of folks say no warn parents immediately so there's no chance of them getting far away and forgetting now a few notes about this apparatus if you're concerned about EMF or radiation coming off this transmitter evenflo says it's about the same power as a car remote key fob which is pretty low power and that it barely uses any time transmitting about one second in two hours of driving if you want to use this as a hand-me-down which of course you do the battery here is not replaceable but you can get or buy another one from Evenflo you just replace the whole clip you'll buy it if it's after the first year or so of the seat you get a new one for free if it's before then if you have more than one kid you're going to have more than one seat well you can have multiples of these that report into one receiver under the dash it's not just a one to one relationship and if you have a hybrid or a car with automatic start/stop technology that would stop and perhaps throw this thing off you need to get a separate special receiver up there under the dash which Evenflo will send you it's green instead of the one we have which is black so electronic sensing that warns you immediately when you come to a stop some interesting modern technology innovations for today's cars that are hybrid and have auto start/stop and it's from a major maker at a major retailer Walmart's got the exclusive on this for one year until summer of 2016 goes for about a hundred and fifty bucks now without the sensors safe tech looks like you can get almost the exact same seat for ninety dollars so you're definitely paying a premium here but it seems to be going down the right path coming up your email evie our hybrid which makes most sense for you if either when CNET on cars continues people are terrified of handmade sports cars British or otherwise because they have a reputation for breaking a lot mean Lotus used to have the unfair acronym of lots of trouble usually serious and this car doesn't feel particularly handmade I was I came in expecting it to but actually it doesn't everything feel something we built it's a step up from where Lotus used to be buy more from the ex car team of CNET UK at cnet.com slash welcome back to see net on cars I'm Brian coolie here's that part of the show we take a few of your emails his first ones coming in from Matt and he says I'm a keen viewer of yours from Australia on your program when you display the car stats and specs on the screen such as power and torque weight or fuel economy would it be possible for you to add the metric figures alongside the Imperial or the American figure he says it's difficult to make those conversions on the fly while I'm talking Matt I've had a lot of emails about this topic and we've decided we're going to make a change in how we present car specs let's run now we're going to do going forward so now in the future starting with our next episode of CNN on cars will express horsepower also in kilowatts which I know is going to make you happy that's an Australian thing and also in PS we're going to give you a torque not just in pound-feet as we do now we'll also have that in Newton meters which is pretty much the global standard everywhere else we're going to get the weight to you in pounds and kilograms that's an easy one in terms of fuel economy this is interesting mpg in the US gallons per hundred miles is also a u.s. thing although most Americans don't even know about it and of course liters per 100 kilometers is very much a global standard and finally when it comes to acceleration zero to sixty I'm going to stay with zero to sixty miles per hour zero to 100 kilometers an hour is so close and there's no direct mathematical conversion to really do that accurately now I want to want to remember I'm giving you converted numbers of US spec cars not other market numbers expressed in these unit so just know I'm translating a u.s. car to you not reflecting on other part of the world market vehicle Paul in Houston writes in says I was sitting in one of our Houston traffic jams recently my condolences I have been in a couple of those and noticed that the cars around me reminded me today's car design cues are very very similar as if every cars coming out of the same design studio in particular he says vehicle phases all have this narrow grille under the grille and tend to have headlights in the same place of the same shape and swept back to a point aiming toward the side mirrors secondly he asked what about the fact that almost every car seems to have a flat arch around the wheel well openings on the fender he wants to know if there's something going on some kind of conspiracy or some reason these cars have to look so similar let's take these one by one Paul first of all let's take a look at these fenders now he's talking about this area right here this very flat face car makers do this a lot today because it creates a very smooth surface for better aerodynamics they work very hard to reduce turbulence all around the wheel opening so that fender is part of that as well as how they position the face of the wheel flush to the outside of the car and also how they design those spokes to try and flow air over them even as they're spinning all this adds up primarily to mpg gains but it also helps you in terms of noise and maybe a little bit of top speed now in terms of the face of these cars you're talking about this grille down here at the bottom let's look at that a little more closely this was pretty rare in cars a number of years ago now it's very common as you say and that's because the noses of cars have been pushed down a lot sloped down and lowered that's again for better aerodynamics but once you do that everything in the engine Bank has to move down too so now you get a lot of radiators that are living low radiators for your coolant for your air conditioning and for your transmission fluid as a result they need a real opening to breathe air down here as opposed to just having some sheetmetal also in high-performance cars they'll often punch a hole in these corners of the lower chin to flow air in and cool the brakes and a lot of high trim cars that's where they'll put the fog lights like you see on this Chevy in power so a lot of things are going on here largely as part of aerodynamics and a fair amount of it is also fashion it's kind of a gutsy aggressive look William in Hong Kong writes in with a question about electrified cars he says I'm in the market for a new car should I get a hybrid or go all the way to a pure evey electric vehicle says he plans to use the vehicle for the next ten years which one he asks with a better choice for reliability I'll be honest William reliability is not the first thing that comes to mind and the choice that you're trying to make I'm going to be more concerned about driving behavior being appropriate for these two forward technology vehicles here's what you to think about when you're looking at an e V this is part of your checklist first of all charging do you have access to a charger and ideally a high current charger not a household outlet that doesn't get you very far and what is the charge time for the evey you're looking at secondly what is your range your typical driving in a day which you'd have to accomplish between charges and that is going to be a typical number you can't always predict it thirdly what's the battery warranty this is a huge expensive component of any electric car you want to make sure that manufacturer has got you covered against eventual drain down and it wearing out to the point that it's no longer practical also take a look at incentives I don't know what it's like in the market where you are in Hong Kong but incentives can take the form of helping you with the purchase helping you with the lease giving you some kind of a rebate or giving you access to lanes to get around traffic that regular cars can't get into now if you're looking at a hybrid car the list is similar but a little different first of all look at the payback hybrids tend to cost more than their gas equivalents so see how much more in typically thousands of dollars and then work it out in number of years to earn that back before it even begins to put money in your pocket then take a look at the type of hybrid there are regular hybrids that generate their own electricity there are also plug-in hybrids if you have one of those and don't drive a lot of miles you could in theory use it as an Eevee most of the time and only as a gas-electric hybrid if you go on a longer trip after that we get into some very similar concerns about battery warranty it's also a key component in those cars and the same concern about incentives my other issue is you're looking to keep this car for 10 years I'm pretty sure in years an EEV or hybrid is going to be ancient technology at least I hope so because we need some improvements in those as the market gets hungrier for them thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed this episode keep those emails coming as you can see there are a bigger and bigger part of the show all the time I really appreciate your thoughtful comments and suggestions and let someone know about the show if you haven't already on social media and look for us on any of your favorite streaming platforms or channels we're probably there I'll see you next time we check the tank you