Gadgetory

you give the car an input 100% of that turns into a precise output alphas back in a serious way and we're gonna bring you the proof the Bible of car tech that determines how cars look and work and my top five car electronic heroes it's time to check the tech we see cars differently 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 see net on cars the show all about high-tech cars and modern driving i'm brian coulis we get a lot of cars in around here occasionally they are all new models to our shores in the US but very rarely do they also herald the return of a car maker that's exactly what the Alfa 4c is doing the first volume production car from Alfa Romeo to come to America in 20 years it also sets the table for the alphas to come let's try this little red wonder and check the tech this is how alpha is setting the table for its us come back with a minute supercard his dead manual rack and pinion steering you almost never find that me more let's drive the Alfa 4c check the tail ok anatomy of a supercar at in the middle is a carbon fibre tub that's where you sit on either end or aluminium subframes that's what connects you to the rest of the car behind you is the engine behind that you're gonna find it very small and the only trunk it's warm place you wouldn't take a lemon meringue pie to the track back there you gotta put that on the passenger seat the front looks like a trunk it's not there's just apparatus in there it only comes off with tools - people know + - now while the 4c is little its body seal is not getting across that thing is like taking a trip across country well once you're in it's snug but not tight you've got an LCD and rather compact instrument panel up there it's kind of godly rendered but it gets the information across the head unit is an afterthought in fact it's aftermarket that's a parent Astro and Antwon reviewed one of those years ago a little bit of app support but it's kind of a weird little outlier obviously not the point of the car the drive controls are you've got asymmetrical paddles downshift left up shift is on the right here is your transmission drive control for your dual clutch automated manual one is the same as drive puts you in first gear there is no park neutral reverse and then your automatic or manual switch over mode I don't like many other cars if you grab a shift while you're in automatic it holds for a few seconds in manual mode and drops back to auto this is an interesting control down here you can tell somebody an Alfa was in love with the idea of having a control called DNA and what it does is control the cars drive modes its DNA D is gonna be your dynamic month and down one more gets you into what they call natural mode and how do you make a work what is that yeah it's kind of tortured its all-weather mode go up to dynamic though hang on to that guy for like five seconds and there's the Easter Egg you get into race mode now your abs and your stability controller both turned off you better know your car well first huge part of the story on the force sea of course lies back here in the engine bay mid-engine car rear-wheel drive one choice on the transmission it's a six-speed dual-clutch automated manual now the engine itself 1750 CC inline-four servo charged of course it's also got direct injection and multi-port fuel injection the idea is that each of those is better at different parts of the RPM range and driving load range so the car will alternate back and forth or blend them the number 237 horse 258 pound-feet of torque gets this car that weighs about 2,500 pounds up to 60 and around 4.5 seconds now note that if you're one of our European or a rest of the world viewers your 4c weighs a lot less over 350 pounds less because in the u.s. we have a lot of crash standard apparatus especially at the front rear ends and of course we're loaded up with air conditioning other niceties that you can strip out in other markets in a car like this that matters a lot the fuel economy if you care is 24 City 34 Highway that's actually really good so you're getting a really fast exotic car that sips gas what's not to love first thing you notice on the 4c which you may be hearing are all these glorious noises you've got the spooling of the turbo you've got the whooshing at the intake you've got the Popoff valve blasting off once in a while as they bleed off excess boost this is the nearest thing to the sound you get in a Veyron that's exactly what it reminds me of the next thing you're aware of is the steering it's high ratio come unassisted tuck into a corner like this and the precision is amazing there is prodigious power here but unless you keep it on the boil you're very aware of turbo lag it's not like it's not there as either alpha or some other reviewers will tell you but in a car like this it's not a big impediment because you're happy to keep it schooled up keep your foot in it now Alfa Romeo doesn't plan to come back to the US as a value brand but they gotta have this cars a screeching deal for its exotic engineering and extremely wearable handling we're looking at about 55 to face and then there are three things we'd have to go see in style that can be as packages 1,800 bucks I will get you Park distance sensors the only parking help you can get on this car better speakers an alarm and cruise control Americans like that stuff the track package for 2400 gets you a firmer performance suspension some carbon fiber trim I could live without and a rear spoiler and if the base exhaust isn't rowdy enough for you 500 bucks into the sport exhaust so your neighbors will fully hate you all in about 60 grand for one of the most distinctive cars that we've ever driven and perhaps one of those responsive ones you ever will find our full review on the Alfa Romeo 4c at cars dot cnet.com you may think car companies sit down to a clean screen when they design a car but it's anything but that coming up Wolf's thumb through the book that dictates much about every car in the u.s. that's coming up when see that on cars continues up until 1967 making cars in the US was a bit of the Wild West strong hot blooded safety was only loosely regulated cars were largely designed for style drag your chip rolling through the you read thing then along comes Ralph Nader his book unsafe at any speed started a national dialogue about auto safety Congress held hearings and on March 1 1967 the federal motor vehicle safety standards took effect a vast Bible of safety regulations that all new cars must conform to if they're gonna be legal for sale in the US for example just consider the lowly safety belt the first thing the FMVSS mandated back in 67 it says that this device must have no burrs or sharp edges on its hardware have only one way to latch it the belt can be no less than 46 millimeters wide it must adjust to fit a 5th percentile female all the way up to a 95th percentile male have between five and six thousand pounds of braking force have its cut ends treated not to fray resist UV light and micro organisms and have the belts maker model manufacturer date and overseas importer permanently inscribed on it and that's just a summary for a belt regulations cover just about every part of a car involved in crash avoidance crash worthiness and post crash survivability from bumpers to lights shifters to doors mirrors to buttons brakes to display panels but if you really want to see the effects of the FMVSS just look at a graph as the miles we drive in the US have soared the deaths per mile driven have plummeted the expectation of automotive safety has radically changed since March of 67 and car makers now it pays to double check that every bit of their designs conform to the FMVSS welcome back to CNN on cars coming to you from our home at the Mount Tam Motor Club just north of the Golden Gate Bridge well it would be natural for you to think that your car's main output if you will is motion but in fact it's not its heat hence your car's elaborate cooling system that envelops the engine in fact about 70 percent of every gallon of gas or diesel you burn makes heat not movement that disturbing fact makes for interesting car tech 101 on technologies that try to do something better with all that waste of that roughly 70% of your car's fuel that is wasted about 85% of that goes out as heat exhaust systems grills ducts radiators coolant plumbing and fans they're all over your car just to get rid of heat but heat is Just Energy why waste it why not convert it that's what car makers are seeking to do via two main strategies the first is around the thermoelectric effect that occurs when connected materials react differently to heat creating an electronic differential between them that generates current spacecraft have long used this to generate electricity from the sun's rays an example is BMWs work on thermoelectric generators that capture the heat in the cars exhaust system to make electricity in a solid-state manner a 7-series for example needs up to a thousand watts of electrical power while running any of that demand you can offload from the alternator saves gas researchers at Boise State University along with Robert Bosch Honda and the Oak Ridge National Labs are working under an eight million dollar federal grant to create better thermoelectric generators by using nanomaterials they hope to improve vehicle energy efficiency by a solid five percent now another main thrust is turbines Ford is keen on using exhaust heat to warm up fluid that creates vapor pressure to spin a turbine generator and make electricity sort of like a mini nuclear power plant without the nuclear part BMWs turbo steamer project is similar and they say it'll be on the market in around six years they're seeing up to a 15 improvement in test vehicles but our hoping to get a solid 10% in the real world on longer steady drives now the real keys to all these technologies are threefold first prove their efficiency gains in real-world driving next get the size of the mechanisms down so they fit in small cars where efficiency is often more prized than larger ones and of course manage the cost so the fuel savings are not overshadowed by the price of the ten in a moment hard starts in the cold and top-5 electronic technologies that have changed driving will see that on cars continues you welcome to the Vantage GT 3 the most extreme small aston ever to grace the roads it's designed for the track not for crushing continents personally I think that's a good thing why not add some more anger and fire into the mix buy more from the ex car team of C net UK at cnet.com slash welcome back to C net on cars I'm Brian coulis here's the part of the show where I take one of your emails and this one's coming in from Dillon s in snowy cold New England and he writes in hey it's been a pretty brutal winter for us in the New England area yeah I should say I own a 2008 BMW 335 X I he writes it's a coupe today I started my car in minus 10 degree wind chill weather and it started fine without hesitation but after a trip back from running errands and parking my car a yellow battery light came on this question is how do I know if this is a battery problem or an alternator problem well let's clear up battery versus alternator Dylan I think that might help you first of all the battery is primarily your device for turning that engine over when you're cranking the car from dead to a start the alternator doesn't have anything to do with it it has to be spinning up later when the engine is running to keep the battery charged that's its main task if you're having a hard time starting your car initially that's likely a battery issue if at the end of a drive you come back and now the car won't start and it did before that's likely an alternator issue it's not keeping this guy topped up as you're operating your car to get a really good test of how your alternator and battery are functioning in different modes you do have to go to a shop where they've got a pretty elaborate professional electrical circuit generator they can check the battery's abilities to take a charge to deliver current and also how well the alternator is replenishing the battery in the meantime you've got a double whammy really cold weather causes a battery to typically send out a little less current because it slows down the chemical the action by which it makes electricity secondly in that really cold weather your oil gets really thick and kind of viscous makes it even harder to turn the engine over from a battery that's delivering less current so you see how it's a daisy-chain effect that's why the toughest test for electrical systems is often in the coal in the meantime you might want to look at one of the new breed of these portable battery packs that can jumpstart a car or charge your laptop or charge your phone there kind of do all devices and they're lightweight and small now my colleague Wayne Cunningham did a nice round up of several of these you can find that at scene at home by the way on your era of BMW I think you might have two battery indicators one for the car service battery another one for the battery in your wireless key fob make sure you know which icon you're seeing that key fob was supposed to be in that little port in the dash at least a couple times a year to keep it charged up now we cover a lot of automotive electronics here on this show in general electronics have done more to revolutionize cars in your lifetime than any other avenues of development here are my top five examples these are hands-on things you experience in your car everyday or soon will number five is infotainment seems pretty low for something which includes navigation mobile devices satellite radio and apps and more but I put infotainment electronics rather low because it still lags well behind our phones in terms of scope and elegance and until that changes it stays down here in the cellar number four is lighting yes General Motors rolled out smart lighting like our tronic I some sixty years ago but it was like something out of a Flash Gordon movie wonky today Auto lighting electronics are solid you may switch your new cars lights to automatic the first night you own it and not touch them again for months and soon smart beam shaping lights will arrive that will utterly transform the way your car lights the road not just when it does number three keys and security it used to be that when your car was getting boosted all I could do is sound an alarm that nobody cared about today security electronics actually try to stop the theft not annoy neighbors immobilizing the car's ignition unless an electronic smart key is present and that same key is rarely handled today thanks to electronics just leave it in your pocket and the car's door handles and ignition recognize you even other settings may follow based on the keys presence it's ironic that a key we barely have to touch anymore seems to be getting bigger and heavier all the time number two is Road sensing this is a big one it rolls up infrared radar laser camera and ultrasound to read the road detect cars around you and even find and get into parking spaces alongside you it's moving us fast from a current world of driver assist to an imminent world of self-driving cars the other side of the coin are the sensors that drive things like ABS airbags and stability control those are the big three that have made huge reductions in many kinds of injuries and fatalities on the road before I get to number one I can tell you it won't be climate control in spite of having a lot of electronics behind it it just doesn't seem to have made that much of a difference tell me you don't still fiddle endlessly with the heat and cooling controls as you drive the number one way electronics is revolutionized cars lately is in the power drink today's engines and transmissions are run by computers instead of past technologies like carburetor adjustments or vacuum timing contraptions and voodoo transmission tweaks Electronics have made car power trains more powerful less fuel consuming much cleaner and with ages between many service intervals this is also the main reason your car starts and runs the same every time unimaginable a few decades ago and whether you drive a minivan or an m3 that appliance like quality is the electronic benefit you enjoy the most every day thanks for watching I hope you enjoyed this episode follow me on Twitter if you want to get sneak peeks that the cars were shooting or the segments we're producing for future episodes of CNET on cars and of course look for us on any of your favorite streaming platforms pretty sure you're gonna find us there I'll see you next time we check the tech you