Gadgetory

do out ett full of high-tech fun making diesels clean no really and why black boxes don't need to be required in cars it's time to check the tech we see cars differently you 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 to show all about high-tech cars and modern driving i'm brian coulis when you may have noticed out ease not stingy about pushing some of its best tech into its more affordable and smaller cars and the third-generation TT is no exception drivetrain has dramatically improved styling as you can see is quite different virtual cockpit is getting a lot of buzz around the industry and it comes in roadster and coupe forms of which we got the former so let's get it on the road and check the tach the Audi TT once referred to a bit smirking Li as this little ladybug of a thing among sports car purists not anymore this third generation gets an awful lot of things right and puts an edge on the product technologically on the road into the eye howdy was kind of sneaky with this one back in January of 2014 we got an early look at what would be the style of the new TT but it was in a concept mini electric station wagon the front clip though arrived almost unchanged on this new car and I gotta say it's the handsomest TT yet in three generations and unlike a lot of complete generation updates this one's dimensions don't meaningfully change anywhere length width height even weight all about the same as the outgoing car we have a roadster with the cloth tough there's also a coupe that has some little tiny back seats in there our car instead where the back seats would go is where the top does go that coupe by the way can also be had as a hotter performance TTS the roadster doesn't come that way your first reaction when you get on the new TT is where did everything go it looks like we're back in the 60s it's a blank - with some vents that's because the star of the show is the virtual cockpit over there in front of the driver that's a 12 point three inch virtual all LCD instrument panel the gauges are virtual and they can either be full front and center like you see or with a click of a button they move backstage you can go full map for example pretty impressive driving all this is a quad-core NVIDIA GPU and they've added a couple of new interesting buttons on the wheel those get you into sub menus and one of the first thing your passengers are gonna say is wait a minute where's my ability to control stuff you actually can see that screen pretty well from here but it's far from optimal this is clearly not a car where the passenger is supposed to be fussing with stuff but instead hanging on for dear life and of course you've got your MMI controls down here excellent voice command touchpad on top of the knob this is all pretty standard Audi stuff as is the 4G LTE connection that powers all this including an excellent online search and the ability to go photorealistic on the maps at certain elevation levels the other interesting part of cabin craft Audi is done here is to get read your traditional bank of HVAC controls and instead embed everything in the knobs on the vents five vents five knobs the outer ones control your seat climate and heating and the center ones handle temperature and fan and air flow direction it's super clear fast to use nice system and blessedly Audi's dump the MDI the proprietary multi device interface and now uses good old USB 16 TT is powered by a 2 liter inline-4 turbocharged and direct injected of course 220 horse that's up nine from last year 258 pound-feet of torque that's the same as last year one choice of a gearbox in the US a six-speed dual-clutch automated manual no six-speed manual available here and all-wheel drive Quattro of course zero to sixty happens in 5.6 seconds slightly quicker if you get the coop faster still if you get the coupe TTS our car weighs about 3400 pounds including that ragtop mechanism does about 26 average 30 on the highway under way three words in this new titi light bright and tight that's what it feels like in terms of powertrain in terms of openness and in terms of perceived weight on the ground one of that light perception is from power that comes on but almost no turbo lag I really have to salute them for doing a really good job on that especially when it's a - later for that it's sitting under that turbo so then I'll have to fall back on but the power comes on very effortless and when it does come on it flows in order the fastest dual clutch gearbox is out there now we've experienced this gearbox before and it is a good one but what's so great about it are the lightning-fast shifts when you press it and the extremely good table manners when you don't we've seen how you drive select before this I believe the first time when it can also affect the logic of the Quattro all-wheel drive system for example in dynamic mode which is sport mode it can tell the Quattro system to behave with a bias towards the rear wheels by default one of my favorite engineering accomplishments you can't see and that is this sort of invisible tub that I'm sitting in formed by the windshield the header and this power wind buffer behind me when that's up and everything else is up around me but tops all the way down you've got a very isolated beautifully climate-controlled scenario inside of here oh it's augmented by these little neck heaters back here on these optional sports seats they blow warm air over your deck bottom line is you're gonna love all evenings on the road top down in this car the top goes up and down quickly about ten seconds either direction and trunk space doesn't vary it remains small ish no matter where the top is but at least you know what to expect we're gonna start about 46 for for a TT Roadster by the time I had some tech those nice neck heating seats and a surprisingly affordable BNL audio option I'm somewhere in the low 52 range the cabin tech is hard to beat on this car though your passenger may say otherwise the ride handling and the power and the delivery and the whole light bright tight way it drives are outstanding I love the looks now there's not much to dislike about the new TT find our full road test review on that 16 PT with the drop top at cars see Netcom well sometimes it seems like almost nothing will scare a teen out of distracted driving except dying that does it and yet as soon as they tell you that they turn right around and pick up their phone while they're behind the wheel we've got some new insights into that dichotomy for the smarter driver we've seen that on cars returns you you the intersection of driving and experience and obsession with mobile tech is a dangerous place to be that's exactly where you'll find many teen drivers raise your writing that you've ever been distracted in your car everybody write a brand new State Farm Commission survey of one-thousand drivers aged 16 to 19 found they both fully understand the dangers of distracted driving and do it texting is number one in the world of cognitive dissonance 95% of teens say yes it distracts them from driving and 44% still do it anyway watching videos behind the wheel came in number one in terms of how distracting teens acknowledged it was that's good but a substantial 15 percent said they still do it talking with a passenger was of course almost universal and 49 percent of teens recognize that that too is a form of distraction red lights are seen as a sanctuary by our teen drivers though the law doesn't typically distinguish that from any other part of driving and that statistic is no comfort if you're the one behind a teen texting madly at that fresh green light agents this teen panel reported deterrence to distracted driving come in two main form number one not wanting to crash and about half that many by the way said they know someone who did have an accident while driving distracted and number two not wanting to get busted by the way only six percent said having a safe driving contract with their parents was a deterrent teens may not be envisioning a world where they put the phone down as much as one where they don't need to the vast majority believe that crash avoidance tech will prevent crashes by distracted drivers it pays to double check your teenage drivers connection between what they know and what they do 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 what is VW gonna do for these four hundred and thirty thousand cars well this VW emissions cheat scandal has a lot of people asking if Diesel's ever really can be clean without all kinds of complicated expensive gear like urea injection systems that add complexity and cost to the cars VW said they were doing it without that expensive complicated gear see how clean it is of course they were lying so now we're gonna do a car tech 101 to explain the current state of the art and the potential future state of the art of cleaning up diesel for agents derided as slow and more noticeably filthy automotive diesel engines went in for a big makeover over the last couple of decades common rail injection is a form of fuel injection that can spritz diesel into the cylinders at very high psi and very precisely controlled bursts that kind of control of the amount of fuel and how often it sprays into the cylinder combined with turbo charging revolutionize both the power output and co2 emissions coming out of diesel engines starting in the late 90s around 2006 ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel became the norm in the UK Europe and us it reduced the dirty sulphur content in diesel fuel from 500 parts per million to 15 taking that out reduces the energy content in a gallon of fuel slightly but primarily sets the stage for a key pair of cleaning technologies to kick in selective catalytic reduction puts a special catalytic converter in a diesel cars exhaust system inside that can is sprayed a mist of urea fluid that combines with heat and the special metal surfaces in the catalytic converter for a reaction that scrubs diesel emissions way down in several key areas the downside of scr is that you have to add this expensive plumbing to the car's underside and refill the card supply of urea fluid from time to time typically at ten to fifteen thousand mile intervals some dealers will do it for you as a courtesy during routine service or you can do it yourself with a bottle of the stuff from Amazon or an auto parts store it's like adding washer fluid but it's one more thing to fiddle with the TV movie from fool's luck right about now we should have smelled something fishy VW is meeting stringent new US diesel emission standards from 2009 on without scr on most of its diesels which seemed like a trick no other car maker could pull off as we now know they weren't pulling it off either these events are deeply troubling retrofitting one of these bulky complex scr exhaust systems and urea tank to the affected TDI VW s and Audi s out there is one way VW may have to address the current cars that are on the road and violating emissions standards but what if diesel exhaust can be cleaned up before it's even exhaust that's what they're working on at the Oak Ridge National Labs where they're developing diesel engine tech that injects fuel into the cylinder early in the combustion cycle something which almost defies the definition of a diesel that along with a new breed of sensors to manage the fuel timing precisely based on nuanced real-time measurement of cylinder pressure could be a big breakthrough the diesel engine is by its nature a dirty beast but it's fuel flexibility lovely torque and high MPG keep it an important player in combustion auto engines even if keeping it there requires a constant stream of new cleaning tech in a moment your email why you don't find a CVT in a Lamborghini but a black box in almost every car when CNET on cars continues the 570s might be MacLaren's new entry-level model but it could be the most important car from walking's finest ever the 570s is the first car in McLaren sports attention has gone in to make this a real car you can use everyday 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 the part of the show where I take some of your emails this first ones coming in from Andrew B who says here we are almost over with the year 2015 when are we going to see black boxes black box data recorders required in all vehicles this is an interesting question Andrew now I've got a black box right here as you can see it is a box it's not black this particular one is out of a late model Toyota that's basically an ABS computer many sensors feed into these connectors here and there's a computer processor or two on the motherboard what makes us a black box though is that it records a snapshot of your driving behavior and keeps that at all times it's a running snapshot if you will of probably about 30 seconds on this one it could be longer could be shorter and that's data that a lot of folks find is that are very useful if they're investigating a crash or very unnerving if they're the one whose crash is being investigated interestingly they are not required in the u.s. nothing in the federal code says that a car has to have a data recorder that said because of all these advanced systems that these cars use today virtually all the cars sold in the US do have one in there because without that memory that ability to look back a little bit on what's been happening with the car a lot of systems like ABS and stability control just can't operate so they're there for another reason the other thing about black box is to know is that they are regulated to some degree by US code that they have to gather a certain number of data points I believe it's 15 right now and structure that data in a certain way many cars will harvest far more data points than that but the feds only have a say about a small number of them and how they're stored in the car so if your car has one the law does say something about what it has to hold check your own state laws to find out who has access to the data in your cars black box especially in the event of an accident okay our next question comes in from zion mr long-time CNET on cars viewer he's emailed in before this time he says is it true the turning on the air conditioning while driving at high rpm could cause some of the air-conditioning equipment or plumbing to rupture I hear this one a lot not as much as I used to but people still ask me if I turn it on while I'm at high speed and that whole system has to son be engaged like that is that going to blow or break something in the AC system in my experience I think it's just a myth people have been snapping their AC on from the off position on the freeway by the millions probably daily for decades and I don't really know that I'm aware of a lot of AC failures that happen in that moment typically AC tends to degrade badly hoses go bad and tend to leak out the refrigerant compressor clutches will go compressor internals will wear out but I think this one's a myth maybe there's an AC technician out there in the audience let me know if I'm missing some nuance here shoot me an email at on cars at cnet.com okay our last email in this show comes in from William V who says could you explain briefly the technology behind CVT continuously variable transmissions and why they're not used for more performance cars he says one would think the ability of a CVT to maintain an ideal engine power band at all times would make it a perfect gearbox for sports performance and racing equipment it absolutely would seem that way William and I'm with you on that being able to keep an engine in that rpm sweet spot is one of the Holy Grails of performance but there's a problem cvts don't have really strong positive engagement because they are not made up of cogs and teeth to a traditional transmission is or really hard locking clutches and torque converters they're kind of a constant slipping mechanism as a result they don't handle really high power all that well that's not where they have found their main role though they do maintain the sweet spot in engines but mostly to seek economy not to seek maximum power and torque output a CVT as you probably know is made up of a bunch of pulleys and belts a variable pulley metal steel belt that is able to slide between these varying pulley flanges all the time that's the nature of it's slightly slippery technology we did a whole episode on transmissions back in May of 2013 it was episode 18 that explains this really well I'll put a link in the show notes so you have to go hunting for it the show notes for this episode the over at see net on cars calm another issue around CVTs in performance cars is that they don't sound the same a car with a CVT tends to constantly be in about the same rev range more or less doesn't run all the way down and all the way up the way a geared transmission can or could and therefore it's not going to be very satisfying in the performance driver who likes the sound of running through the gears in a real transmission thanks for watching hope you enjoyed this episode and you know how we built this show it's around your comments questions and interest you get those to me via on cars at cnet.com I read every one answer as many as I can I'll see you next time we check the tech you