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the Mercedes to change perceptions of Mercedes the amazing crash test that never happened and do we know self-driving cars are really that safe it's time to check the tap we see 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 to show all about high-tech cars and modern driving i'm brian cooling when i say Mercedes you think something luxurious with a little pomp with ostentation perhaps after all it's a car that says you've arrived but now there's a new Mercedes out that says you've arrived and you did so in a hurry let's drive the all-new 2016 Mercedes AMG GTS and check the tech yep this is a Mercedes one that could make you rethink what you think of the free pointed star well if you're going to have your new car look like anything you can certainly do worse than having it look like that but in fact the Mercedes AMG GTS goes head-to-head against a very different car the 911 specifically the 911 turbo let's compare them the Mercedes is 179 inches long a little less than 2 inches more than a turbo 103 and a half inch wheelbase that's what you're really seeing a 7 inch longer spread between axles and a 911 turbo and in weight there were then about a hundred pounds of each other the cabin of the GT is like a tight-fitting Tom Ford store darkly handsome purposeful and taut did I mention it's tight in here this is what a performance console should look like upper-left is your mode button your own independent set Comfort Sport Sport+ and barely restrained race start/stop behind that stability control take it off at your risk and independently adjust suspension compliance separate from the modes on the knob behind the fan control you've got your manual automatic gearbox toggle your blessed auto start/stop defeat and a mode switch for the exhaust in your face or really in your face too bad it's set so far back much of it falls under your elbow instead of your hand the head unit is Mercedes command TAC that we've seen before no new ground being broken here but I've really warmed up to the configurable Mercedes favorites screen that you access via either of two buttons on the controller it lets me set up what I think the home screen should be and does so very nicely it's also annoying that once you launch the powerful Google online nav search app which has Street View and some other great tools the cars voice command tech doesn't talk to it I've got to turn it out with the knob or I got to use the handwriting pad not bad but no cigar by the way early 2016 Mercedes will also start to add in apple carplay which we've shown you before into some of their models no word yet on when Android auto will join now up here in the very capacious engine bay is a very small engine a four liter twin-turbo v8 but I mean it's itty bitty front of its about here back of it's right about here it doesn't take up much room at all but boy doesn't put out some good output partly because it has twin turbos and notice where they live on top in the valley in the V between the heads almost every other car with turbos puts them down on the flanks alongside the heads and on the side of the block by doing so the turbos are closer to the intake they're actually feeding you get faster sharper response from them that way this engine also has a dry sump that means it does not have much of a pan underneath it for oil allowing it to sit down nice and low and give you this nice arc of the hood 503 horsepower that's only 17 less than a 911 turbo by the way 479 pound feet of torque goes out to a 7-speed dual-clutch transmission mounted in the back it's a trans axle to be correct and that's fed by a carbon fiber driveshaft super stiff no sloppy with that trans axle in the rear and this engine sitting right here about five inches behind the front axle line you get something akin to a mid-engine car and certainly a lovely weight balance the best compliment I can give the GT is that it drives like it looks that rounded muscular rear portrays the direct lag less power and the only two wheels that get it the long prow suggests the way the front end hunts a corner and those rear tips remind you it's one of the best soundtracks in the business Jaguar does it louder but AMG doesn't bet the four driving modes are distinct and satisfying altering power delivery shift tightness suspension behavior and if you option something called dynamic plus even changing the firmness of the engine and transmission mounts adaptively on the downside are a few ergo issues it's like driving a tank the pillars and rear quarter really kill visibility and the whole thing is just a bit too tight inside I'd get stir-crazy about halfway between San Francisco and LA that puts me in Kettleman city so it's an issue I'm Mercedes AMG GTS starts at about one hundred and thirty one with destination and I'm going to load it up with a lane tracking package for about nine hundred dynamic plus gives me those adaptive engine and transmission mounts I like that panoramic roof I'm going there for under thirteen I'm not crazy about $5,000 audio upgrades but if I'm going to get the carbon ceramic brakes why not in all in that about 150 grand done up see next I'm far from affordable but in certain avenues of auto dumb it's considered attainable and that's key to this car it is almost supercar light but not at supercar prices a hell of a lot of fun on the road you'll be hard-pressed to mistake it for anything else that you see on the road it is about one shoe size too small on the inside and it fundamentally helps change what everyone thinks Mercedes is if you want some more on that AMG GTS check out Wayne Cunningham's take on it over at Cars cnet.com when we talk about self-driving cars you naturally assume it means a much safer car right I mean that is the single big idea behind moving this way with technology yet do we have proof or is it mostly assumptions a decimal latest thinking on this for the smarter drive we've seen that on cars continue Oh 33,000 people died in 2014 in us road accidents another 26,000 in the EU vast numbers unequaled in rate by any other means of transportation so the main selling point for self-driving cars early on has been dramatic reduction in accidents however in their first million or so miles of real-world testing on public roads they've yet to stake a claim to that hope a new study by Michael C vac and Brandon shuttling at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute look at the data from the early self drivers fielded by Google out and Delphi the inconvenient truth these early self drivers have a higher accident rate than their human driven counterparts here are three more nuanced takeaways however for the smarter driver first of all the accidents that self-driving cars are involved in tend to be minor and let's face it we've gotta get over this sci-fi ideal that self-driving cars will never crash and embrace the reality that they will crash less often and with less severity secondly the self-driving car accidents so far have not been the self-driving cars fault it's been the other guy the human oh my god now that will change of course that these cars propagate into the real-world market and the hands of non trained professionals who aren't official company testers and certainly the miles driven so far by self-driving cars are under optimal conditions the current state of cars that rely on sensors around the vehicle to see and read every situation really can't hack it can heavy snow or hail or even a wicked thunderstorm see back and suddenly at University of Michigan also point out there probably some awkward teenage years ahead when the earliest commercial self-driving cars will be basically surrounded and outnumbered by human driven cars they with their hard logic we with our fuzzy logic it's gonna make for some unpredictable results bottom line as we get these early indications of the efficacy of self-driving cars toward reducing accidents it pays to double check the reality of what the goal is complete accident reduction or really a dramatic improvement in fatalities at least in some situations welcome back to see net on cars coming to you from our home at the mountain Motor Club just north of the Golden Gate Bridge well automotive crash tests to figure out how safe vehicles are are a dramatic tangible way to understand how when and where a car will deform when it hits something that ain't gonna move but it does seem like a rather twentieth-century process doesn't it what if the whole thing could be turned into basically a very high-resolution video game it's happening makes for a fascinating car Tech 101 it's part of the automotive landscape new cars crashed intentionally with great precision and measurement to determine how they'll behave when you do the same thing to them with far less precision and intention but the setup is exacting and tedious a given car can when you crashed once and there isn't time to crash every model of every year of every make of car enter virtual crash testing which stands to perhaps revolutionize this spectacle of auto crash worthiness cars and their parts are all designed on computers these days via CAD computer-aided design the design is just a file of data that same data which exists about every part every panel every rivet screw and weld and even the amount of gas in the tank along with any crash you can imagine can be fed into a computer a serious computer running 10,000 cores across 200 or so cpus and gpus turn off the lights come back in 10 or 20 hours and see the crash that never happened it's amazing to look at the realism but more important are these three games it's repeatable no cars were harmed in this collision that means you can run it over and over with the cost and set-up time of real tests remove its peelable you can peel back or make invisible any portion of the car to see how a given sub assembly performs in real time can't do that with a real crash test and it's variable find a weakness redesign that area via CAD upload the new design data run the crash again see if it's now fixed no need to retool and create a new part for another crash test so why are we still crashing cars for real well virtual crash tests aren't complete they're about 90 plus percent accurate and data for a gap that should be closable risk does move slowly car makers insurers and regulators aren't the type to jump overnight to a new method where our lives are involved it still takes too long that half a day to a day of data processing per crash test needs to come down and widespread adoption is needed not every car maker uses this technology nor are they using a standardized version of it nonetheless virtual crash testing looks like it may do to the world of crash worthiness what the computer did to photography in a moment your email does working on your car put you in hot water and who makes the best quality cars when CNET on cars continues I had some doubts whether or not the XP could handle what we were going to throw at it but it did remarkably well it took on every challenge we threw at it and came out unscathed it's comforting to know that during the inevitable zombie apocalypse there are going to be vehicles out there that are able to take us to where we need without having to rely on roads and I for one celebrate that fact find more from the ex car team of CNET UK at cnet.com slash welcome back to CNET on cars i'm brian coulis here's the part of the show that i really like taking some of your emails first one this time comes in from dr. Ron and Reno who says some of us like to add equipment to our cars that the manufacturer only offered on a more expensive model or not at all case in point he says I put BMWs own night-vision system into his 2016 328i sports wagon that's a model that doesn't offer BMW night vision pretty creative he says he used an independent shop after the dealer said they wouldn't do it and told him it would void his warranty he says I did it for sacrifice my cupholders to make room for the LCD screen you can see some of those photos there where he put the screen and where he put the front sensor he says could you explain to your audience of the 1975 Maus Magnussen warranty act affects consumers who choose to add options or obtain service not approved or provided by the manufacturer interesting topic Ron this is so big and weighty I'm actually going to do a whole car tech 101 on it in our next episode episode 84 the meantime let me give you a couple of quick pointers here on the three entities that have something to say about this first of all as you mention the Magnussen Moss Warranty Act of 1975 this one's enforced by the FTC the Federal Trade Commission here in the US what Magnussen law says is you don't have to use factory parts and you don't have to go to the dealer to get your work done to keep your car in warranty the caveat to that is if you go use aftermarket parts that are crap or go to a lousy independent shop and either of those cause damage to the car that is not under warranty the next one I want to tell you about is what's called CPE Insurance this is customer provided equipment it's an insurance industry term you are insured in you're in it's policy for the stuff that the factory put on the car if you go and say add a fancy tire and wheel package to your car or put on a completely cool stainless aftermarket exhaust and that gets damaged in a collision it may not be covered the insurance strictly covers what was put there by the factory for the most part anything substantial beyond that may not be in your coverage you got to look for the CPE language in your policy and or see if your insurer requires you to take out a separate CPE writer to cover the specific things you've added it's kind of like adding jewelry to your home insurance policy you know that works you got to sometimes do declared a special coverage above and beyond the basics and the third and final one here is a more of an outlier but becoming a big topic lately and that is the dmca the Digital Millennium Copyright Act which has lately been interpreted to say if you go into a car and change its firmware it's software that lives on chips you are in theory breaking the DMCA you're breaking a copyright law that says you can't reverse engineer or hack in to that kind of technology that intellectual property which the car maker has burned into the chips in your car the most recent interpretations though are saying you have the right to at least go into the firmware to diagnose a car and work in the code of the vehicle you'll have to stay out of there and leave it to the dealer but a lot of the stuff is being tested and figured out right now we'll talk more about it in car tech 101-80 in our next episode next email comes in from just indeed who writes in about car quality he says when I was younger my father used to talk about how Japanese cars were so superior to American ones according to him it had something to do with the superior attitude of the Japanese when it came to manufacturing is that still the case now I know what you're talking about there has long been a halo around Japanese quality that began back in the late 60s and early 70s when this Toofer happened Japanese cars came here with great fuel economy right about the time we started getting hit with these oil embargos and fuel crises and secondly Japanese cars were built extremely well to try and enter this competitive market at a time when American quality was indisputably getting really sloppy move forward today decades later you'll still find that the Japanese makes get the best grades from let's say consumer report it's for long-term reliability I mean look at the list and you'll find Toyota Lexus Honda scion subaru overweight in the top ratings that said I can tell you from my experience that cars are increasingly occupying a narrower and narrower band of quality there isn't a lot of junk out there anymore there have been major gains by the American makes there are three reasons why quality's gotten so good in cars from what I see from our technology point of view let me run those down for you briefly first of all is the era of digitization in design and manufacturing of cars cars are designed on computers and car components are milled and shaped and often made by computers you get extremely good repeatability and the actual production of those parts is highly precise with very close tolerances because of the digitization and computerization of manufacturing and design the next big factor are the Tier one suppliers your car maker doesn't make a lot of the parts that go into your car they use what are called Tier one suppliers enormous companies that are expert at making axles cylinder heads speakers seats whatever it may be and as a result of that specialty and the fact that they've got global audiences so they get a lot of consistency in practice excellent parts go into cars these days and the third thing is electronics as cars became more and more electronic starting with electronic fuel injection going back what thirty something years to the fact that almost everything is electronically run and monitored now in a vehicle you've got an awful lot of precision and a lot of intelligence in the vehicle that can keep things running right without you having to fuss with it and constantly take the car in to get it tuned by a human thanks for watching I really appreciate you being here hope you enjoyed this episode keep those emails coming they are the backbone of this show it's on cars at cnet.com and if you haven't been there lately head over to see net on cars comm we will find some great archives of our segments like our tech 101 and smarter driver I'll see you next time we check the tech you