Gadgetory

the refreshed Honda Accord why it's so good what about you your seats want to sense and the VW scandal the king of them all and powered by tech 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 car welcome to CNET on cars to show all about high-tech cars and modern driving i'm brian coulis we spend quite a bit of time lately roaring around in mustang shelby GT 350s and Corvette zo6 --is but I never like to stray too far from the real world where cars like the Honda Accord live just as happy to see one of these come into the scenic garage especially since they've rather heavily revised the 16s sheetmetal and electronics let's get in the 16 accord sedan and check the tech Don Accords one of those cars that you know doesn't make the hair on the back of your neck stand up but I'll tell you what I can drive one of these things all day long as so many million do the 2016 Accord is not a completely new car it's on the same platform as the one we've had since 2013 so the basic volumes and dimensions are all still the same but they've really revised the front and rear in particular on the outside look at the face it's much more sculpted and scowling people like angry scowling car faces for some reason out back there's a lot more accurate DNA to my eye and again more finely sculpted and muscular you've got LED tail lights on all the 16 accords and up front you've got LED headlights available now on the top line that's called the Touring when I got in this 16 accord in a couple ways I wasn't sure was in a Honda first of all they've done some really smart stuff with cabin tech which to be honest they don't normally do in this case it's Android auto and car place side by side no excuses no extra cost I've got my phone cable down here to a convenient USB data and charge port and that's that and check this out you've actually got a live web browser now not while you're driving obviously but this is normally really high-end car stuff you can pull over and watch CNET on cars but wouldn't I still have my gripes about the interface though first of all there's no volume knob yeah you got to use that rocker on the wheel or this touch thing to the left of the screen no thank you and you can get too many weirdnesses on these dual screens like having audio on one and the same thing on the other one that's a waste the overall interface though has been revised to be more elegant yet still featuring some of the cleanest largest touch buttons in the biz I like that the succour DXL stays pretty close to the playbook under the hood a 2.4 liter direct-injected inline for doing 185 horse and almost the exact same number on the foot pound CVT is the only gearbox on this trim lowered Accords can get a six-speed manual upper Accords get a traditional automatic overall you can get pretty close to 40 on the highway and of course all the cords are still front-wheel drive okay first thing I want you to do if you go test drive this means 16 Accords coming to a stop like this cutting onto the wheel and feel the pedals I find that it idle there's kind of a vibration coming through that I don't expect in a modern car that isn't exactly cheap so you got to check that out for yourself maybe I'm nuts I don't know now once you get going all that harshness kind of blows away and I'm left with a surprisingly perky 4-cylinder but I coffee mud head the 6 when I first drove this I was impressed CVT gearbox you can hear it going through it smashing ations there that's the only choice on this EXL trim it's a good one I got to give you that you know I'm not a huge CVT buff now it's not too hard to plumb this engine and find its breathless spots so it's not a real super powerful engine but in everyday driving you're not going to notice them the big tech ticket on the road is Honda sensing their driver assist package including collision mitigation braking which can go to a full stop forward collision warning lane departure that is active to keep you in your lane road departure mitigation which is different from lane departure it keeps you from going off the road and adaptive cruise control first time in an accord our amplitude reactive dampers that means two valves in the shocks to read the road surface based on frequency of vibration and move between the two valve sets to be either firm or compliant okay if the onion ever does a special on firstworldproblems there's a technology in this car that needs to be the cover store it's called Road assist or something I mean just the name is onion ask what it does is it uses the electric power steering and the vehicle's various sensors to help you steer straight when you're going down one of those peak ground roads I never knew that was fatiguing maybe I was missing something and I continue to love this Lane watch camera it's one of the best cameras in the auto biz's that one that looks down the right side right on a 16 accord four-cylinder EXL which is very high trim a little over 29,000 I'm gonna load up some sensors on that wireless charging tech but definitely move my trim up one more notch to get the navigation but more importantly the Honda sensing adaptive Drive tech that bundle for 2 grand you're stealing that all day long we're in about 32 to CNET stop find our full review notes on that 16 Accord Sedan over at car cnet.com nice everyday driver well you probably know that cars sold in Europe and America even the same make and model do differ in some ways but a recent and rather obscure trade tariffs negotiation has surfaced a substantial and little-known difference between cars sold on either side of the pond that is of great interest to smarter drivers in both I'll fill you in let's see that on cars returns it's called the transatlantic trade and investment partnership is being negotiated now between the US and European Union and seeks to increase the ease of trade between the two regions by addressing tariffs yes but more interestingly by normalizing product standards between the two markets no product is subject to more standards than automobiles one of the big assumptions was if we test US and European cars and find that they're basically equivalent if not equal in terms of safety standards we can call it a wash and let them cross markets and that would avoid expensive re-engineering and recertification of every car before it can be sold in the other market now stubborn differences between the two markets have existed for a long time mean automotive Li just look at the first Jaguar e-type the series one at these lovely glass covered headlights by late 67 those were gone thanks to US regulations and the car never looked quite the same again same goes for those five mile-per-hour hideous US bumpers that luckily never got adopted in the EU but this is not some battle for the aesthetic high ground in fact it's a battle for the dollar high ground the Atlantic Council estimates that US car makers could go from shipping about 13 billion dollars in cars into the EU market to nearly 85 billion dollars by 2027 and by the way automotive would be the biggest single industry to benefit from this normalizing process so for now automakers are saying this study needs more study while the European Transport Safety Council says maybe we should leave cars out of the negotiation one thing's for sure regulators can now agree that it pays to double check if cars that seem equivalent in very similar markets really are 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 as fitness bands and smartwatches Duke it out to see who's going to be the platform of choice on our wrists car makers have gotten this inkling that their seats should be the biometric platform under our butts makes for an interesting car Tech 101 what if your next fitness wearable weighs about Oh 30 500 pounds it's not entirely unlikely as more and more technology companies are deciding the inside of a car can be a wellness monitoring tool for SIA here is a good example they call this their active wellness seat technology I am right now sitting on a sensor it looks like a seat but in the bottom cushion is a sensor you can call it a butt sensor because it's using my rump to figure out my heart rate and my respiration and then the tricky part is doing a very complicated signal-to-noise process to take out all the vehicles vibration and thumping it all gets reported up somewhere in the dash like on this mock-up there's my heart rate there's my respiration rate right there below that they're able to use another algorithm to figure out if I'm stressed right now or if I'm sleeping in the middle is fine but either those extremes it can then do some kind of seat therapy on me a combination of massage heat and cooling could be used to wake me up if it's a really vigorous massage with cooling or calm me down maybe if it's a more calm massage some other factors that you can deal with once you have this data captured you can send that off to a medical professional you can also MUX that data together with what's coming off your Fitbit for example to get more accurate data overall interesting wrinkle on crash detection what if when a collision is detected they don't just send the severity of the crash on the location but they can also send my heart rate and respiration to emergency responders they know a little bit more but what they're going to get into when they arrive here then if they don't have that data and then from this of course automakers can decide to extend that more they can tap into a sensing seat like this to do their own sort of response systems for different moods also make it part of a holistic almost intuitive Spore mode or comfort mode for the overall drivetrain depending on what mood you bring to the car that would be on the OEMs plate to do that by the way the medical grade sensors behind this technology are already in use in hospital beds to measure certain patient parameters Jaguar si is using them as part of a platform called mind sense in addition to reading brainwaves it also envisions a biometric seat to read heart rate and respiration rate particularly to better know how to alert the driver of a future autonomous Jaguar when they need to take control again the advanced Institute of industrial technology in Tokyo was several years ago working on a seat Tec that reads the contours of your rump to identify you basically a butt print to get access to the car and a few years ago Ferrari applied for a patent on seat technology that would go beyond measuring heart and respiration by adding brainwaves measured by a headrest sensors in the aim of better tailoring the cars drive mode to the drivers mental hook clearly the day is coming when car seats will do a lot more than just keep you off the floor in a moment your email all about the VW emissions scandal and why it's like no other when CNET on cars continues you it's time for the 991 to get a midlife refresh except rather than a nip and a tuck and a bit more power this time it's got a whole new heart and it's turbocharged the turbos mean you get more power more torque more mpg mold everything really but it also means push can keep up with its increasingly turbocharged rivals buy more from the ex car team of CNET UK at cnet.com slash welcome back to see net on cars i'm brian coulis this is the part of the show I really enjoy answering some of your emails and they all kind of go one direction the last couple weeks it's a torrent of questions about this emerging VW emissions gate story some of our questions come in from Chrissy in Chicago who says you know in the u.s. we kind of just seem to hate Diesel's for some reason you think the media is just zooming in on the problem especially hard Kelvin C says I know you like these cylinders he's referring to me and I do I'd love to hear your perspective on why VW would do this and what a repair would look like for VW diesel owners and Peter T says how about a discussion of old versus new diesel technology that helped enable this scandal to happen in the first place this is an unprecedented issue in the auto industry sure we've had some big debacles before I mean look back at what's happened with Toyota gates that was the unintended acceleration Hyundai and Ford had some issues with stated versus observed mpg that were pretty stark General Motors still working through an enormous recall on badly designed ignition switches Jeep had some unprotected rear fuel tanks that were a big problem and of course takata's massive recall of airbags that explode but all of those are in a different category than what volkswagen has done the revelation of some 11 million volkswagen and audi turbo diesel powered cars have technology to willfully and repeatedly skirt emission standards is truly unprecedented specifically VW engineered the software in their engine ECU on these cars that's the engine electronic control unit to sense when it's hooked up to an emissions testing program and then to modify its own software parameters to meet low emission standards got it then when the car sensed it was disconnected from an emissions test it went to a different profile entirely that allowed it to get better performance but at vastly higher emissions 10 to 40 times the legal allowed rate and to do it actively when not connected to an emissions test is what is so evil about this not that many years ago the engine control units weren't that sophisticated it would have been almost impossible for VW to engineer this kind of deceitful behavior I bet a lot of folks there wish it were those days right now they wouldn't have been able to step in it like they did instead they've taken a huge hit on many fronts it's cost them who knows how much in market value it's measured in billions of euros they've lost their CEO they've yet to even see likely billions in penalties from US regulators and they've got to figure out what to do with all those cars on the road somewhere from an expensive re-engineering and recall to possibly the largest buyback in automotive history and they've given diesel cars of black eye on the US market a market that was already kind of sketchy on them in the first place thanks for watching really hope you enjoyed this episode we appreciate you viewing seen it on cars follow me on Twitter it's Bryan Cooley and you'll see regular snapshots from the field and know what we're shooting next for our on the road segments I'll see you next time we check the test you you