Gadgetory

the TLX trying to sharpen up Acura's missions will demystify head-up displays because they're coming and the new thinking on distracted driving it's time to check the tech pc cars differently 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 cement on cars welcome to CNET on cars the show all about high-tech cars and modern driving i'm brian coulis if i want to do a top five of your most requested cars that we take a look at this year based on your email the acura TLX would be pretty near the top at a time when acura is trying to redefine where it sits in the world of automotive brands and what it really does uniquely the TLX draws some pretty sharp lines let's drive this all-new model per your request and check the tech this may look like a car it's actually a lot more than that pimping for Acura which has a brand could use a little more definition to really help answer what is inaccurate and this is the TL actually think is gonna really do it P Alexis comes standard with all-wheel steering but optional is the all-wheel drive a v6 like we have starts at 36 1 then we loaded up CNET style the tech package is around four grand for navigation GLS audio forward collision warning lane departure blind spot lane keep assist but if you want to get adaptive cruise with collision mitigation braking and technology to keep you from leaving the road that's another thirty to fifty now inside we've got this Acura oddity of dual screens the one above response to the controller the one below responds to your finger little silly when you've got entertainment on both of them but it gets more interesting when you hit the nav button and now you've that full screen navigable in tert Ament rig below for example and it gets silly again if you want to type in an address and you get two different keyboards but in general I think most drivers are gonna appreciate the additional breathing room beyond that apps are limited to media apps Pandora and AHA which are well integrated with all the other audio that's smart but if you're looking for other apps that are not about basically streaming they're not gonna find them here on an accurate yet you've never lacked for choice when it comes to media in recent Acuras and they back it up with the LS audio which is one of the better performing sets of amps and speakers I've listened to Siri eyes free is supported in your TLX if you've got a modern iPhone the rear camera has three angles all of which are sort of mushy in the day and sort of insensitive to light at night now up here in the snout we've got the three and a half liter v6 as we mentioned earlier huh leave that on 290 horsepower 267 pound feet of torque good numbers and we're coming out of an engine that of course has direct injection variable valve timing front wheel drives the basic setup you can get all-wheel drive and it's that super handling all-wheel drive that Acura does which is a pretty amazing system now if you get super handling all-wheel drive you also get auto start-stop on the engine to save fuel interestingly without all-wheel drive you don't therefore in our car were looking at 21 city 34 highway 0 to 16 uh pretty sprightly 5.8 seconds let's go for a ride and see how it feels so there's this pause stuff work I think it really does maybe it's the power of suggestion just reading about it's got me thinking it but as you come into a corner the rear end gets real tight II kind of tucks itself in that to me feels like some rear-wheel steering not any kind of torque vectoring because we don't have that this car doesn't have the all-wheel drive now we do have the bigger of the two engines of course the power is ample but it's not overwhelming this isn't the kind of car that has an edge to its power even if you get into Sport Plus which really sharpens things up it's a nice car it's a sophisticated delivery of power not brutal fun to corner with it that rear end is doing something special that's neat I'll tell you I'm torn between this gearbox and the DCT that you'd get with the four which I imagine is sharper this one's just a little too behind the engine you've got great response from this motor and then the gear changes take about a heartbeat too long going either direction last impressions I leave you with on this car is that it feels quite light part of that is how the throttles map how the transmission shifts but also how the suspension is keeping things from plowing it's overall a very tidy experience juggling a phone while driving not a good idea in anyone's book but as this habit has entered our driving culture why are accident rates still going down the new thinking on distraction in a mall as cellphones have taken off so has handheld calling behind the wheel doubling from around 3% to about six percent of drivers observe between 2000 and 2005 but since then it seems to have leveled off at around five or six percent observed texting behind the wheel has increased from 0.2 percent 2005 to about one and a half percent observed in 2012 and at the same time auto accident fatalities and reported crashes keep falling part of that is due to separate innovations in safety technology but to other things seem to be going on here the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety and Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that while juggling a phone is in arguably risky it also reduces other distracting driver behaviors we'd be talking to passengers declines from 12 and a half percent to a little over five fiddling with climate or radio controls dropped from 3.6 percent to 1.3 eating behind the wheel goes from 3 percent to less than 1 even talking singing and dancing drops dramatically from over five percent to just over 2 secondly they found that drivers on the phone tend to slow down an average of 5 to 6 miles per hour which may infuriate you behind them but does buy them some reaction time nobody says handheld phone use behind the wheel is a good idea but distraction has been here before the phone and it is the enemy not just the phone so it pays to double check that as you put the phone down you aren't just busying your hands eyes and mind with something else 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 until recently head-up displays in cars were a kind of futuristic or be found only in really expensive cars and even at that they look pretty awful like something ripped out of an old Atari machine now things have changed head-up displays are looking great portraying really useful information and showing up in a lot of cars at different price points makes for a timely and important car Tech 101 but in the car they're actually after the same thing providing situational awareness it really is projecting a transparent image but that image is also focused out in the distance so then when you view information the road stays in focus at the same time so everything is within your field of view the automotive hood actually dates back to the late 80s the olds cutlass supreme had a very simple one a very crude one by the late 90s we saw a color hood on a Corvette and in the late 2000s they really came into their home we started seeing some really nicely rendered one on BMWs in particular with all kinds of interesting infographics and really sharp colors today's HUDs give you glanceable access to a fairly common set of information points first off is speed they almost all do that navigation prompts are very common certainly when destination is entered rpm shows up on some cars and have an advanced sport profile a few will show g-forces again this is a performance car thing now generally is skewed in hood design is information that is not mission critical to the job of driving so don't look for media information metatags about your music and such you don't eat that in front of the road climate settings ditto and fuel temperature or other gauge indicators other than speed and rpm so far still live on the instrument panel one of the biggest changes in HUDs is not in the hood itself but in the way they're being adopted this is a big deal this year 2014 some 38 models of cars are available in the u.s. that have a HUD it's either standard or optional that's nearly three times the number of cars available with a HUD five years ago according to Edmunds it's a bellwether number if not entirely watershed and there's an aftermarket in a country where 16 million or so new cars are sold each year but 230 million cars are on the road this is important not long ago Garmin had a unit you'd sit right up here where a factory HUD would go and they would give you a very text oriented readout largely around navigation of course startup navdy is bringing up much richer version of that idea to market soon there's this going to deal with media communications as well as nav of course and do it with gesture recognition as well as voice can you use hand gestures in your voice to control read new text there's a major problem with many of us being addicted to our phone and you know not wanting to stop using our phone while while we're driving a car so we really wanted to make using your phone in in the car dramatically better and more intuitive but also far more safer and we think you know the head-up display technology is a key part of the answer to that problem the barriers that HUD technology is conquering in the dash are largely three first their size the space behind your gauges where the projector needs to live is tiny hot and under high demand by a lot of other stuff but the tech is getting smaller or lives on top of an edge then there's cost it's coming down as makers of the core technology are gambling on mass manufacturing giving the efficiencies we've seen before and the aftermarket Tech is arriving in the few hundred dollar range and there's comprehension consumers are becoming aware of what a HUD can do and are developing a visual information appetite that it needs to satisfy you can thank a lot of this to the smart phone and tablet revolution of the last decade or so now the end game on HUDs is to make them a primary display not a secondary or in many cases non-existent display today and then that logically leads to getting other displays this LCD in the center console this dashboard in front of you the instrument panel maybe those don't need to be there at all it frees up designers to do perhaps more interesting things or more contextual things with the information our cars later in the show we're gonna close the loop on this hood topic with my top five reasons that the average car really should have one someone once said to me that one of life's true great experiences is driving with the roof down in a bright red Ferrari under the sound of a beautiful v8 right behind my head the 5/8 spider about experiencing the noise we by more from the ex car team of CNET UK at cnet.com slash welcome back to see net on cars I'm Brian Cooley time for seven your email this time it comes in from lis in Los Angeles who writes dear Brian what are the five coolest pieces of technology available on cars today how do they work and what cars do they come in well that's a bit of a big question its but thank you for asking you've raised the bar rather high it's a big area to look at right now II like cars have become motivated and marketed by their technology as much as any other aspect of the vehicle take a look at some of their really glossy big dollar marketing and notice how the tech these days is often played ahead of performance above styling even above safety aspects now also make sure you catch our December 5th episode of seen it on cars but I'm gonna do a top five car technologies to look for in the year ahead through 2015 that's gonna interest you a lot well speaking of top five we've got one coming up now that ties back to our discussion of head-up display technology earlier in the show now regardless of whether it's hands on the wheel eyes on the road mind on the task we've gone through all these avenues trying to manage distraction the bottom line is there's more information in the cockpit so the thinking goes get it up in front of the driver so it and the road are in the same plane of focus here for the doubters are our top 5 reasons why head-up displays do that so well and our imminent number five eliminate the center console screen you heard me get rid of that Center display I put this low because yes even in the car business this is considered heretical talk but it is talk you see that big flat immovable LCD right now middle of your car is kind of a big flat necessary evil for car designers if they can get rid of that thing and have more creative flexibility in the middle of the dash they'll do it hope it just doesn't mean more cupholders that number four gesture control in the car one of the keys to powering future gesture control of our dashboard gear is to have a tightly integrated interface otherwise you're flailing your arms all over not sure what the car was expecting from you or getting confirmation of what it thinks you just flailed for a head-up display can be that easy channel number three information in context think about it all the information your car presents to you is basically in the wrong place speed isn't shown laid on the side of the road navigations not shown laid out on the lane even your engine temperatures not displayed on the hood nothing else is such a digital Picasso in your life but HUD could make things live where they should be number two faster refocus every time you glance at a gauge or a screen you have to dramatically change your eyes focal plane and your center of focus and then do it again when you look back out the windshield and keep doing it over and over and by the way it doesn't get faster as drivers get older a HUD lets your eyes stay in largely the same plane of focus and the same scope of you seeing everything number one is of course the holy grail eyes on the road because you can't react to what you didn't see HUD technology for the first time will let drivers see everything at once integrating the information of driving with the optics of driving while you carry out the physical actions of driving in many ways the fact that cars were born before hug technology is kind of a sad accident of history thanks for watching I really appreciate you being here and don't forget wherever you like to watch video we're probably there go to YouTube you can subscribe to our scene that on cars channel head over to your Roku box for example and search see net on cars to find it on any of the channels there and don't forget to go to cnet.com slash to find all of our content including on cars on our mobile platforms I'll see you next time we check the dick you