Gadgetory

BMW i8 looks like the future but Newton's mpge explains and our top five car tech trends to watch in 2015 it's time to check the tech EC cars differently 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 CNN on cars welcome to CNET on cars the show all about high tech cars and modern driving i'm brian kool-aid i can tell you right now no car we've had in this year has generated so many slack jaws and requests to take a picture of it as the BMW i8 an amazing sculpted body gullwing doors and underneath all that carbon fiber and a powerplant they've never played with before this is a car we have to drive let's get out their checks attack when BMW said they were gonna start with a clean sheet for their eyes series of cars they weren't kidding about this one when you attack a corner and get on an attorney it's just fun the i8 looks drives and moves itself like almost nothing else on the road the i8 is BMWs first plug-in hybrid but as you can see they didn't exactly go after the Prius this car has concept car looks now it's also impressive as the construction technologies used here aluminum and plastic panels or what you see but you don't see is a carbon-fiber reinforced plastic passenger cell or what they call in racing a tub makes the car incredibly strong but also exceptionally light and that's critical and you've only got a three cylinder gas engine and a smallish electric motor efficiency is important here in the age of performance inside it's a 2+2 nominally the +2 parts a little optimistic as you can see now the first thing that grabs you about the cabin of the i8 is not some amazing futuristic interface notice most of this switch gear is physical standard BMW stuff you do have an instrument panel that's all LCD and of course you've got your eye drive screen right here but what does grab you is the very spacious futurism of this it's low slung you sit low the dash is low it feels very wide it's a distinctive experience a lot of cameras on this car you've got a rear camera of course there's also a front camera and it can be stitched together with mirrors to give you an overview camera over here is the button that's an interesting way of enabling or disabling kind of the perimeter curtain of driver safety tech collision avoidance and you can set exactly what systems are turned on into what sensitivity media sources on this car are pretty much what you see in other BMWs with the ability to have a hard drive storage space external devices plug in through the USB and aux you've also got a snap-in 4g adapter available here we don't have that on our car but notice a couple things in this vehicle a M stands for mourning and CD e stands for what you had to lick eight to buy this car because it does not get AM radio and it has no optical disc slot now that's futurism whether you like it or not now when you're in navigation mode this is a little different other BMWs it talks to the powertrain to best put it in the right mode of electric gas or combination thereof to get the best efficiency out of your drive not just the best time in short its distance okay drive controls we know this sort of spatula shapeshifter on BMWs before it with the sport gate to the left start/stop button below that a Z drive to force it into electric if it has sufficient battery no sport or Sport+ you merely have comfort as your standard eco as your reduced or retarded performance when the shifters in sport the whole car goes into sport mode and that's reflected in the gauges as you can see up under its carbon fiber and aluminum nickers is a one and a half liter turbo three cylinder gas engine in the best that drives the rear wheels only through a six-speed Automatic out front is an electric motor and that does the front wheels only through a two-speed gearbox the two ends are only connected by a software add it all up and it spells all-wheel drive but in a very unusual way total horsepower is 362 420 pound-feet of torque or on tap that gets you to 60 in 4.2 seconds under the right conditions you have 22 miles of pure electric driving per charge and that charge takes about two hours on a 240 outlet all said your mpg is 28 and your mpg E in electric mode is 76 in the green car world those with these tepid numbers were it not for this car's performance some people have driven this car come away a little disappointed I understand that it's prowess I thought it was gonna be a New Age GT and in that respect it's fantastic the car handles sy low and flat as it feels inside to here if they develop a exhaust it's not at all wimpy like you'd expect from a highly electrified vehicle they've tuned it demon counteract that impression ride quality is great at all these matters to me cuz we're gonna buy a car you gotta live with it and the shifts super quick the only odd note I've found in this car is around town when you're not really into it it'll sometimes fall in its face as it tries to decide between what blended mode of power it wants to be in or if it should be an electric only and sometimes you'll get this kind of weird indecision I'm not a big fan of cars on steroids so bear that in mind if you are this may not be enough for you but I find it's athletic without being brutal that's my kind of car and it's still fun not sterile okay the i8 is a hundred and thirty seven thousand dollars worth of tomorrow mpg is good for a car this fast but people who buy these cars aren't pinching pennies and while that performance is exceptional as I pointed out it doesn't come across as brutal or extreme so what's missing that market instead it balances both and lets you own a piece of a very impressive automakers future vision and big best check out our full review with all the interesting details on the i8 over at car cnet.com and while you're there you may as well check out our coverage on it's interesting but different little brother the battery electric I three conventional wisdom holds that elderly drivers are dangerous because they can't see well here well or react real well but what if that's not the entire story in a moment the new old driver trend lines and how technology is making a difference the rate of involvement in fatal accidents by elderly drivers has been plummeting since the late 90s so there remains a pretty big difference between a driver in their 70s the green trend line and one in their 80s the great trend line but since 1997 overall it's been the older drivers who had the biggest drops in fatal crashes per driver and per mile driven a new study by the triple-a finds that about 34 percent of elderly drivers have ever talked on their phone while driving compare that to 82% of people 25 to 39 older drivers tend to wear seatbelts drive sober drive less and less at night now to be sure older drivers are involved in a lot more fatal accidents with a pronounced spike beginning at about 70 years old but they're not blind to that more than three-quarters of elderly drivers believe they should be subject to driver health screenings and be required to renew their licenses in person and technology will help more in the future boomers in their mid 50s and mid 60s now are buying the most new cars per capita replacing 35 to 44 year olds according to a recent study by the University of Michigan that means new technologies that focus on blind spot lane departure and collision warning are likely to be snapped up by the drivers who can benefit from them the most nice when it works out that way it pays to double check if you or a senior driver you know has a car with these collision avoidance technology 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 now you recall that BMW i8 we just saw had both an mpg and an MPG rating that's a new rating that showed up in 2010 first applied to the Nissan Leaf all electric and to the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid now since then a lot of other cars have hit the market that have an mpge rating and yet a number of folks who drive them don't really know what it means sounds like we need a car tech 101 now of course we all recognize the mpg in MPGe that's the easy part but that little lowercase e at the end that's actually surprisingly powerful let's break down the acronym first of all mpg E stands for miles per gallon of gasoline equivalent now the equivalent part is what we're talking about energy in a gallon of gas as opposed to the volume of a gallon of gas which is what mpg basically refers to here's how they work that out numerically the EPA says that a gallon of gas has 115,000 BTUs or British thermal units of potential energy in it and that they say is equivalent to 30 3.7 kilowatt hours of stored electricity kilowatt hours is typically how you measure the capacity of a battery now the math isn't simple as you can imagine and this is part of how they actually pull that equation together but let's take a look at how the cars that use mpg are sorted out a battery electric car can have mpge like a Nissan Leaf or a Tesla Model S all you do is plug them in that's their only source of power then you've got plug-in hybrids those are vehicles that have a gas engine and a bigger battery and can still run in a blended or separate modes you've also got hydrogen fuel cell car which is also electric but using a different source to generate the volts what you won't find an MPG rating on is a conventional hybrid because the epa is just deemed those to be too conventional now if you look at the stickers it's an interesting story here's a battery electric car all that has is an MP ge number cuz it doesn't run in any other mode there's no gas involved go to a plug-in hybrid and it gets very bit here's your MPGe on the left which shows the pure electric running on the right here's the blended system number that shows the fact that it also can run on gas that's your mpg number what I also want you to notice is what's in the fine print on these new stickers look underneath either the mpg or the MPGe and you now find a european-style gallons per hundred miles or over here kilowatt hours in hundred miles this is not just semantics if you do this you can avoid what's called the mpg illusion which basically says that if you measure a car that improves from 10 to let's say 15 mpg that is not the same as a car that improves from let's say 50 to 55 you might think those are equivalent gains in fact the lower number improvement is vastly more significant than the higher number improvement of the car that started at 50 but if you measure in energy per hundred miles it's linear the distortion is taken out mathematically and of course the gas engine car doesn't get MPGe at all you'll see your traditional number there on the sticker still because all it does is run on gas in a moment the top five car technologies I'm watching in 2015 we've even seen that on cars returns since 1999 the Audi TT has been a mainstay on roads all over the planet now Audi's on to the third generation after a difficult but ultimately very successful second album they've got to get this one right else people go elsewhere for their sports car kicks buy more from the ex car team of seen at UK at cnet.com slash welcome back to CNN on cars I'm Brian Coulee time for that part of the show we answer one of your emails this time it comes from Paul T well as a question about fuel additives he says I was curious if it's a good idea to use fuel additives they say it could increase mileage and at the same time cleans the intake valves and cylinders I'd really appreciate it if you guys can bring up this short topic on your show it's actually not such a short topic Paul if you wanted to really get into it with car buffs this can go on for days and come to blows but here's my thinking on it first of all I find it very hard to believe that the world's refineries and automakers with their armies of engineers somehow are leaving some MPG on the table that additives makers are the only ones who have the secret code - doesn't really wash with me there's another way to look at the EPA Environmental Protection Agency here in the US does not test fuel additives they register them if you find one of these it somehow proclaims it's got sort of an EPA endorsement not the case they simply register them but make no indication whether they work or not now there are also devices you can add to your car that go on the fuel line in the air intake some of them go in the ignition that supposedly say they're going to improve your efficiency some of them dramatically they did a test on those a few years ago and the EPA found that most of them did nothing a few of the major MPG worse and a very few improved it vary slightly depending on your drive style so just think about the technology and sophistication in your modern car the way that it's built the way it's monitored the way it's computer-controlled and decide if you think it's likely that a 5 or $10 bottle of some fuel additive you dump in the tank is gonna uncover mpg that your car maker couldn't get to now this of course is our last episode of 2014 so around this time of year we're thinking a lot about what we should be covering next year a lot of that of course comes from your emails but also our scanning of the landscape of automotive technology so here is an early sample of what I think is gonna dominate the car tech headlines in the year ahead my top 5 car tech technology is to watch yeah this is one of those videos I know I'll regret the minute I do it because there are so many important technologies breaking out in cars in the year ahead the choosing just 5 is kind of a fool's errand so I volunteered here are the five technologies to watch takeoff in 2015 number five fuel cell cars now these are not gonna be big volume by any stretch but they will be big headlines Toyota just put their Mirai fuel cell car into limited production and Honda is gonna be hyping up the intro of its new one in 2016 consumers are no longer blown away by the idea of a battery electric car interesting owning one seems to have hit a natural and rather low plateau at least until we get a battery breakthrough that replaces the hours with minutes in the meantime hydrogen fuel cell offers a tantalizing look at the future number four integrated connectivity I mean 3G or 4G built into the car it's gonna be a big story in 2015 some car makers will do it kind of the lame way and use it primarily to create a hot spot in the vehicle as GM largely does and it is gonna do in big volume but others will tie it more directly into the car's dashboard services and apps the way out II and Hyundai are doing it makes a car more like your phone who's not gonna be into that number three dash cams now I couldn't be wrong and this may remain famously our Russian thing but the interest I've heard from you in the past year in dash cams along with the fact that we finally have some big names entering the game along with the fact that our roads only seem to be more and more of a lawless hell every year adds up to more than a hunch number 2 driver assist things like blind spot lane departure and forward collision tech are nothing new but next year we'll see two big trends around them to help save you from your own lousy driving one affordable cars will get these technologies much more commonly because keeping safety tech on just the high-end cars it's kind of a bad message from car makers and we'll see them swing to being mostly active technologies not so much passive warnings that's part of the march toward autonomous cars before I get you to number one safer airbags may be a big innovation next year this Takata airbag recall is a fiasco that is still blossoming as we end 20:14 but otto leave of sweden recently won awards for a new kind of airbag inflator that uses hydrogen instead of what is basically a little rocket motor like other airbags do you see problems with humidity and that kind of inflator or what caused many of these Takata airbags to blow so wildly and create a recall they can't even make enough parts to repair our number one tech to watch next year has to be apps still fairly rare in 2014 but look at Volvo which is going to start installing a suite of them in every car starting with their mid 2015 onward by the end of next year it'll seem like an auto mission to find a new vehicle that doesn't have some built in services like Pandora Yelp or live search for destination also 2015 is the year that many car makers now say they will actually put apple carplay and android auto into production making up for all those blown promises of doing it in 2014 luckily pioneer and alpine beat them to it in the aftermarket thanks for watching hope you enjoyed this episode thanks for being with us in fact thanks for being with us all 2014 this is our final episode of the year we're back with you top of 2015 with big stories from CES and the Detroit Auto Show in the meantime don't forget to find us on whatever streaming platform you like from youtube to Roku to just about any other check out our CNET apps to find CNET on cars and don't forget the email address keep your comments and questions coming I read every one answer as many as I can I'll see you next time we check the tech you