Gadgetory

the most unlikely plug-in hybrids how pickup trucks really crash and the top five car technologies you really care about it's time to check the tech EC cars differently she loved 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 to show all about high-tech cars and modern driving I'm Brian Cooley well thanks to mpg and clean air targets in California and about a dozen other states we're getting some very odd vehicles with plugs in them these days none more unexpected than the Mercedes s-class plug-in hybrid is it a sign of the times a sign of the future or just the price of doing business let's drive it and check the tech now this is mercedes-benz first plug-in hybrid but it's not their first hybrid it's not even their first s-class hybrid they used to have this unloved beast called the s400 that was a mild hybrid without the plug-in part and it did mild things for the mpg like for better in the city a bad and 0 better on the highway so nobody cared it died in 2013 this is a much more serious animal with a much bigger battery and the ability to be plugged in as well as generate on the fly now back here of course is where the big battery lives the additional traction battery for the powertrain this is clearly taking up some space back here although it's by no means killing the trunk this is an eight point seven kilowatt hour capacity battery to put that in context compare it to a Nissan Leaf which is electric only that has a 24 kilowatt hour battery a Tesla Model S has either a 70 or 85 kilowatt hour battery so this is a more modest helper since this car isn't only an Eevee you charge it right there in what I believe is the only charging port I've run into yet that is integrated back here on the bumper some folks have expressed concern that that's a very frequently hit part of a car and how often will that be disabled by bumps and dings in parking lots don't know it's a two-hour charge from flat on a 240 volt circuit which you'd certainly want to have at your home now inside the s550 hybrid is a lot of familiar territory very plush very comfortable and this wonderland of duel giant LCD wide screens I'm not going to recover all this cabin technology for that head over to see net and just search s550 and you'll find our detailed review of the debut of this in gas engine form we take all this apart here's what I want you to notice though two new controls on the console this one here has a little battery icon above the car as you cycle through that you get four different modes right there on the instrument panel hybrid is going to be your most common mode it's your well understood blend of gas and electric power --mode is electric power only silent running and the accelerator pedal will actually push back if your goosing it too hard to optimize battery drain issei v' defends the battery state by using the electric motor the least and recharging it the most and charge goes the furthest it prioritizes charging the battery above all and doesn't use electric motor at all honestly there's a lot of inside baseball here I bet you'll just leave it in hybrid mode and this button right here has an e plus mode it's a separate layer separate from those four it gets a little complex here that one among other things is going to set up camera and radar to look ahead and if you're closing on a vehicle in traffic where you have to trounce the brakes and waste inertia it's going to prompt you to do so more gently an earlier conserving momentum now unlike what you expect to an s-class there's not some big brawny engine in here it's fairly small it's a 3 liter gas engine v6 still ofthey you've got your bright orange electrical current cables down here and that means you're attached to of course the electric motor which is embedded in the transmission on this vehicle inside the works of the 7-speed automatic so it's highly integral for both adding as well as doing regeneration of powers going back to the battery some of the numbers compared to your base v8s 550 329 horse on this guy plus another 114 from the e motor give you an odd 436 total the gas engine car is 449 so that's 13 better torque here is 479 pounds feet 516 on the gas via so we're losing 37 both have the same 7-speed automatic architecture although the gas engine car can be had all-wheel drive this hybrid goes to 60 and 5.2 seconds the gas engine car is a little quicker at 4.8 and of course that big battery charging apparatus an electric motor add weight the mpg is notably improved we're twenty four thirty in the hybrid just seventeen twenty six without it and of course where there is no comparison is electric range this car can go 20 miles on electric power only in the right conditions and up to 80 miles per hour on pure electric this is a key part of the strategy that helps this car work on the credits that Mercedes needs in zero emissions market places like California and other very stringent states if I know underway you know that an s-class is a big buttery thing this one's bigger and buttery here it has this incredibly modulated ride of course owing to that 450 pounds of battery in the back unfortunately the throttle response is real lumpy sometimes you've got a bunch of power sometimes you have a good amount but it's not the same kind deceleration is coming in and out because you've got all these different drive modes of electric gas gas and electric and different kinds of regen it's just not linear and if you trounce the pedal and really get onto a freeway on-ramp or something absolutely no problem it's that around town stuff where it's a little bit you know in and out of different modes it's jarring which doesn't make sense in a car like this so I'm left wondering who's really gonna get excited about this car who out there is saying ah finally that's the s-class I wanted it saves some gas it's it's measurable but it's no Prius so what are we left with I think an s-class that the world wasn't asking for but California and other state regulators were okay pricing on this s550 hybrid is about 95 3 delivered what is interesting is that that base price is the exact same as the gas engine v8 twin-turbo there is no hybrid penalty on this car that's pretty notable other things to bear in mind is these kind of luxury cars in particular the s-class have dramatic 5 year depreciation I think that will be compounded by the fact that you've got a hybrid here which is probably going to be much better in five years and this will be the antiquated technology that's not going to do you any favors either also know that this is only available rear-wheel drive if you want all-wheel drive you got to get a gas engine only find our full review on that Mercedes s550 II with the plug-in the bumper over at Cars cnet.com well you don't have to live in Texas to know that a pickup truck for many people is also the family car so you want it to absolutely be safe but verifying that has become surprisingly controversial in recent months will update the smarter driver when CNET on cars returns Ford's new f-150 truck passes the IIHS small overlap crash test with flying colors except for the ones that dump the big cab super crew version received the coveted Top Safety Pick the shorter super cab version earned only a marginal rating in the same crash the front small overlap crash test of the extended cab f-150 the tope and pedals moved nearly a foot back towards the dummy's legs steering column with eight inches towards his chest coming dangerously close the difference turned out to be a set of special steel reinforcing tubes welded in front of and behind each front wheel in the bigger super crew model the smaller super cab doesn't have them a key takeaway here is that the IIHS can't and doesn't test every version of every car in truck that it crashes usually it doesn't matter but here it clearly does and as a result the Institute has just made it policy that it will test multiple body styles of big pickups that will soon include silverado tundra and RAM which just announced it has added reinforcing bars to all its cab styles 3/2 it pays to double check which model a pickup truck you're considering buying and knowing if that's the exact cab version that was tested or was it a different one that may not collapse quite the same way 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 you may have heard me mention in some recent performance car videos we've done that the vehicle had a dry sump lubrication system the biggest oxymoron and all have Auto dumb we've actually got a number of cars coming up that have won as well so it seems like it's time for a car tech 101 on dry sump now most cars including very likely yours have what's called a wet sump something the old German Dutch word for a muddy wet bog or Marsh which is actually a pretty good analogy for what happens down here at the bottom of your engine is what's known as the oil pan or the crankcase also known as the sump the heart of the lubrication system is the oil pump the two revolving gears create a suction as the teeth move apart this suction draws oil from the storage reservoir or oil pan when this is a wet saw that means basically all your oil lives down here except when it's being pumped out circulate it around the engine through little passages where it gets all the things that need lubrication lubricated and then it drips back down here to do the cycle over again the problems with that design are actually many first of all look at this pan down here on this v8 to my right they're both big and tall that means the engine has to sit higher in the car to not scrape the ground or bump in the suspension that means a higher center of gravity a higher hood knows what have you the auto makers don't like that secondly the oil keeps coming back to this same hot place so it's hard to cool the oil third because this can only be a given size to fit in the engine bay you can only have so much oil any terms would like to have more oil fresher oil and crew oh boy and forth you get oil starvation and design like this the oil is just kind of down there by luck and by gravity in hard cornering sometimes it moves to one side and the pickup where the oil is sucked up goes dry once in a while when that happens the bearings go dry not good a high performance in a dry sump seeks to cure all that if the first high-performance sports car with dry sump lubrication for a lower center of gravity a dry sump engine still has a pan at the bottom of the engine but it's much smaller it catches oil and it's immediately then pumped out to a reservoir somewhere else on the car where typically another pump then moves it back to the engine it's all very controlled and done under positive pressure you end up getting a lower engine and lower center of gravity because you don't have a great big pan to protect down at the bottom you have no oil starvation and hard cornering because everything is done under positive pressure and you end up likely with cooler oil because it gets a vacation from being in the engine all the time and you can have a lot more of it because the oil reservoir can be as big as you have room to fit the downside of a dry sump design is basically cost and complexity you've got a pump or two that are external to the engine you've got some very critical plumbing you've got that reservoir to hold all that oil has to go somewhere else in the car so they're only justified in high performance situations today but if you look at a high performance car look at our reviews of them you're going to increasingly see the dry sump design making its way into vehicles that are not just tracked cars that are high performance Road cars in a moment measuring mileage demystifying all those conflicting numbers and the car tech you really want when CNET on cars continues this is an Aston Martin Vanquish it's a grand tourer and has a big engine it's what happens when you decide you want to treat yourself after a lifetime of hard work you see this cars party pieces it's six litre v12 it kicks out 568 brake horsepower and 456 pound foot it'll crack 200 miles an hour if you've got the space and you'll get from nought to 62 in 3.8 seconds that makes it the quickest accelerating production car still has everything which means there's potential for a lot of silliness indeed 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 one of your emails in this case I'm going to take a whole slew of your emails but before we get to those I want to give a nod to Keith from the Philippines who sent us some photos of his wheel upgrade from last episodes email section remember he has a Honda City with 15 s on it he wanted to go to 19 I suggested more like 17 s or 18s he finally ended up doing his wheel conversion to a nice set of 18 so it'd look really good nice work Keith now we've got a trio of emails to get to about units and measurements that we use on the show as we communicate the specs of cars the first one comes in from Boston who says when you present technical information about a car I usually convert the units to metric myself last time I tried a different online calculator to go from mpg to liters per 100 kilometers and I found out that this calculator gave me 20 percent lower results than one I used previously he asked can you please give me the right formula to convert mpg to liters per hundred weight pounds to kilograms and also acceleration time the zero to 60 thing that we talked about here in the US well let's take those one at a time first of all when you're comparing mpg on cars especially around the world you've got to get to apples and apples mpg and liters to 100 are actually not it's apples to oranges you want to take litres per hundred kilometres and compare that to gallons per hundred miles that stat is actually rated on US cars but almost nobody knows about it over here it's in the fine print on the window sticker and other places we talk about mpg in the US but in fact when you're comparing two cars it's actually not a good way to do it for some weird rounding errors that are beyond my grade level in math once you do look at gallons or liters for miles or kilometers you end up with a very easy piece of mathematical conversion to do converting pounds to kilograms is easy one pound is 0.45 kilograms kilograms are much heavier and 0 to 60 in the US or 0 to 100 km/h in Europe which is 62 miles per hour is messy you can't just do a numerical conversion because each car is got its own unique torque curve and the way that it gets to those additional two miles per hour is not just a straight extrapolation it may spike up or spike down for that last little bit it's not a big deal but you can't just do it numerically I'm afraid they are somewhat different measurements okay next one comes in from Omar he's riding him from Malaysia he says regarding fuel consumption I've been wondering if the gallons you state are US gallons or imperial gallons he says he finds it over on our sister site X car the fuel efficiency seems to be much higher than he hears on SEANET on cars okay so the gallon thing is very different Imperial gallons as are quoted on cars sold in the UK market are 17 percent bigger 17 percent more fuel than a US gallon so you're going to see a complete difference in the amount you get per gallon of fuel it's not even close and the last one comes in from Patrick Pease in North Carolina but travels a lot he says I'm on business in the UK this week and I've noticed that here cars tend to get about 20 mpg more than their US counterparts he says I went on Ford's website and saw that a focus just like I have at home with the powershift transmission gets 54 mpg in the UK and his in the US is rated at just 37 highway why the big discrepancy he asks a few things are going on first of all see the note we just talked about on imperial gallons you're seeing an imperial gallon rating because those gallons are bigger yeah they get a lot more mileage out of their bigger gallon secondly the way cars are tested in Europe and the United Kingdom the actual circuit they drive to measure fuel economy is very different than in the US as I understand it it tends to be a shorter drive at lower speeds than we do here in the US finally though there are very different power plants in Europe the focus there may not have the engine you have over here even if the transmission is the same European consumers will accept a lot of manual gearboxes they'll accept a lot of smaller engines that American consumers just aren't interested in so it tends to be more different than the sheet metal would suggest and we try to explore every new technology in cars here at C net on cars that's kind of our mission but let's face it there's always a core of these things that most consumers care about the most and that makes for an interesting top 5 JD Power asked consumers about fifty nine car tech features ranging from those involved in energy efficiency to in cabin entertainment we've ranked the top five responses based on how many people selected the technology for their short list number five self-healing paint 25% there's really no such thing as self-healing paint there is Nissan's scratch shield but that only smoothes out very minor scrapes in the clear coat only not the paint but we so hate the expensive time-consuming results of a dent or scratch that we keep on dreaming number four a rear camera with the display in the mirror 30% not just a rear cam but one that has a little tiny display at least it's up where you should be looking when backing instead of looking down number three collision mitigating braking 30% this is one of the most gettable of the early self-driving technologies the one that will jump on the brakes when you forget to and if you think this might be driven by the guilt people feel about staring down at their phones in traffic number two is night vision technology 33% here's an odd one since so few people have ever tried it apparently not enough to know that in my experience it often sucks but we love anything with the phrase night vision in it before I get you to the number one technology we want in cars here are the ones we want the least like health and wellness technology gesture control and haptic feedback screens bless your hearts you're right on the money there interestingly missing from the top ranks of what we do want our hybrid technology and the latest smartphone integration like apple carplay and android auto maybe they just need some time the number one technology you say you want in a car is blind spot tech 40% the automotive blind spot back over there is one we know we need help with and they're only getting worse because cars keep bulking up more and more like fortresses on wheels who says you got to join the army to drive a tank thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed this episode seems like you did because the emails come in a torrent and I'm glad you do that it's on cars at cnet.com I read everyone reply to as many as I can and a lot of them become segments in the show I'll see you next time we check the tech you