Gadgetory

the Mini Cooper grows a pair of doors is it still a mini never mind possible will self-driving cars ever be illegal and my top five tips for finding good car repair 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 CNN on cars welcome to CNET on car the show all about high-tech cars and modern drive i'm brian coolie well thanks to a bewildering array of options the Mini Cooper has always been basically whatever you wanted it to be except the 4-door now it can be that as well but along the way towards beginning the Mini Cooper did they lose any of its mini appeal let's find that as we drive the 15 Cooper S 4 door and check the tech now the key to the Mini Cooper 4-door is of course for dorks they've never had a cooper with four doors before though there are other minutes that have four doors the whole car is six inches longer nose to rump about half that much is in between the wheels extending the wheelbase two inches more rear seat legroom which if you're gonna put in rear doors you better have a reason to use them even the front doors are different to allow these doors to be bigger and you also get two inches of additional shoulder room in the backseat because the whole rear quarter of the car is contoured differently it's not like they just took the two-door and hacked it and stuck in an extender this is a substantially different car from the cowl on back still after all that it picks up only 110 pounds over the two-door now the first thing I notice when I get in the current generation Mini that brings a tear to my eye is that this round bezel thing is just a thing it's no longer ever that big iconic speedometer that minis used to have back in the day now it's simply a place for a screen we have the largest screen the eight inch that has navigation now your other interfaces up here you've got your motorcycle style takun speedometer and a little helper LCD down there as well there's one more screen that's optional but we have it that's the little motorized head-up display this kind of visor style you can set that to show speed navigation prompts calling and audio if you use a connected phone in the console cradle nobody has more audio choices than these guys including Pandora Rhapsody tune in audible stitcher Amazon Cloud and Apio and all of that is via the mini connected app on your phone slot it into a phone dock in the console which also gets you power and an external antenna name without an app you got am/fm HD radio satellites optional six disc is optional like you'd really want that auxilary Jack and USB basic audio is a six speaker rig and you can upgrade to Harman Kardon surround sound which we do have now controlling all of your head unit gear is an i drive controller down here but very different than BMW not in its layout but in its altitude when it's up here in a console like on most BMWs ham is like so as it operates it now your fingers like this you're using a down pointed fingertip this was a pain to use now driving arm and he gets us to this automatic shifter because we have the six-speed Automatic will size it up on the road paddles on this car because of the automatic around the shifter you've got your drive mode control like you've never seen before take it over to the green mode the normal mode or the sport mode now under its cute little snout you've got two engine choices depending whether you get a cooper or a cooper s the base Cooper's got a three cylinder this is an S we've got a four both engines are turbocharged but ours has got two liters of displacement versus one and a half 189 horsepower 207 pound-feet of torque 0 to 60 and 5.6 seconds mpg varies on your transmission 2940 if you get a manual interestingly lower mpg if you get an automatic it doesn't usually go that way and regardless of what engine size our transmission you've got front-wheel drive let's go for a ride out on the open road I'm pleased to report that the mini hasn't lost its meaning this even though it's a little more Mexi than it was it still has this go-kart like steering short wheelbase tightly sprung undercarriage and a stiff shell all leads into them and you can hear that nice little exhaust snarl before you turn your back on that automatic know that it's a really good one especially when the rings in the sport mode or the shifters in the sport gate gears change tightly and cleanly I find this is what works best sporty-er rewards what this car is all about the ride quality is what I would call a comfortable go-kart it's not jarring it's super tight some minis in the past especially with the Cooper S package could be a little bit brittle anymore and all around the Ergo is really good it's a spacious enough car for me I'm pretty tall and visibility's not terribly constricted even though we have some very chunky pillars back in the rear corners okay a Cooper s 4-door is 26 or so based exactly a thousand dollars more than a two-door you're paying five hundred bucks a door if you won't look at it that way now 1500 more if you want the automatic transmission it's a pretty good one I got to say and it seems to pair well with the mission of a four-door car once you load this guy I've seen that style you're right up against 30 grand they've retained the essential meanness of the vehicle even though they've added some inches and added some doors a pretty good trick they did their homework and the fact that you've got a more practical and justifiable platform for the purchaser who wants to make sure it's the right car for more years to come they should sell these things like that find our full review on the Cooper S 4 door where Wayne Cunningham fought it lost a little more of its sap than I did at cars dot cnet.com the UN Convention on road traffic observed by 85 countries makes it clear every vehicle shall have a driver that thinking is reflected across a globe full of regulations insurers and traditions where do you start to change that these martyr driver will find out when CNET on cars returns the assumption that every car has a human driving it is being updated though gradually in 2014 the UN amended its 46 year old rule to allow self-driving cars largely at the urging of Germany Italy and France the homes of some big car makers that are developing the machines the new language states that a driver must be behind the wheel and can take control back at a moment's notice but that they may legally pull back from managing the wheel and pedals for some extended periods notably this UN convention though has never covered Japan China or the u.s. in America four US states and the District of Columbia have legalized autonomous cars on public roads though for testing and with a human standing by another eleven are considering the idea twelve states have already done so and said no this sets up a problem in the huge and lucrative u.s. car market fragmentation insurance companies or the other major rule maker if you will so far they envision a world where the driver is still fully responsible though there's been a call by California insurers to have car makers shoulder some or all of the liability around autonomous accidents a 2014 study by the RAND Corporation looked at that idea and theorized it could quickly throw a lot of cold water on self-driving cars or limit the technology to high-priced flagships where the volumes are low and the price is high enough to fund the additional liability but that puts the self-driving cars benefits into a lot fewer people's hands much more to come on this of course one day it may pay the double check who is liable in an accident do or maybe your car mate 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 if you're like most people you probably think of the tires on your car are just an expendable not unlike toilet paper you want something good but mostly you don't want to have to replace it very often you should think of your tires as the more sophisticated expendable more like running shoes yes they're going to wear out but they're a key part of the engineered experience in the mean time and deserve a car Tech 101 now I could do a half an hour on this subject alone and put us all to sleep but instead I want to touch on four high points about tires that I think you can keep on your mind as you go shopping for them first thing to know is the big concept which is your tire isn't this big blob of rubber there's a lot of engineering going in here a structure that is built to operate a certain way not just hold air and unlike just about any other part of your car this one changes shape rather dramatically when it's working that's an amazing thing to keep in mind as well the first concept is the contact patch or the footprint that's where this tread here sits and meets the asphalt and it varies in width and length if you will kind of this way depending on the tire design crasher and your cars weight what happens that the contact patch is amazing that footprint allows three major things to happen first of all for cour to be applied to the road as the wheel is turning one way in relation to the car and for braking to happen as the wheel is being resisted kind of in the opposite rotating direction in relation to the car and then you've got the other two axes which is kind of out and in glad early across the tire that's how cornering happens and you get that nice grip and all of those dynamics typically will happen all at once or within a second of each other and the tires got to be able to deal with all of them well the next thing that we all notice very much and you should be aware of is the profile of the tire its height with relation to its width now we love our low profile tires they look great on almost any kind of car it's been a big trend the last few decades to get this sidewall lower in relation to the width of this trip but what does that is the frame inside the tire they're called the belts they're made of either Kali ester or steel and they don't just bring that profile down when you do you change the nature of how the tire operates in two kinds of loads one is radial load the load that comes if you will kind of vertically down on the tread the stiffer this is that may change the ride comfort you get more drumming in the car you get less of a soft compliant ride and this low-profile tire also has a very different behavior for lateral loads which is sort of this side to side load think of it as a cornering load for the most part this low-profile sidewall is stiffer the tires gonna kind of scooch less left to right as you go in and out of a corner that's great for performance but that can also harshing up your ride because there's less give in this overall design it's a trade-off between that sharp performance and that comfortable compliant ride part and then of course there's the tread itself that actual intricate pattern that we all know and see on the face of the tire this isn't just here as a random pattern or to look cool make a deal tire to be honest there's no tread if you're driving in perfect conditions on a dry piece of pavement on a summer day like this slick right here it puts the maximum amount of rubber on a dry clean smooth piece of pavement but that's not the real world so our tires on passenger cars do have tread we drive on roads that have gravel that have snow that have rain so your tread is designed to deal with all those to work its way around gravel and find the traction between the actual rocks to get down in snow and find some grip in that material or on a rainy day to take the water in the middle of the tread as you race down the street and evacuate it out the side otherwise you end up flying on the surface of the rain that's called hydroplaning and that's no fun and two other factors about tread design the way that it grips and then releases the road is a key part of how well this thing does in corners is it going to create oversteer or understeer all tires have some slip as they turn but the nature of that allows the car maker to dial in the cornering behavior they want in their overall vehicle and finally tread has a lot to do with quietness of a tire the way these lugs grip and release at the road creates more or less and varying kinds of sound that's where all the road noise you hear from tires comes from and that's a big deal on luxury cars in a different way than on sports cars a last thing I want to bring your attention is rolling resistance what it takes for this tire to roll down the road varies dramatically by its design the really grippy wide sticky tire is going to be great at cornering accelerating and braking but perhaps require more energy just to keep the car moving at a set speed let alone to accelerate it and that's not a good guy in an era when automakers are looking everywhere to save even a few drops of gas per mile now it used to be that low rolling resistance tires which you'll find on many very high efficiency cars were awful they were like having a three-day-old bagelman on each wheel now they tend to be pretty decent performance tires not extreme but acceptable they're much better at having a quiet rod pretty good performance and actually looking good as well oh by the way if you want to know what all this stuff on the side of the tire means it calls out much of the technology within it and we did a separate piece on this a little while ago about how to read your sidewalls it's important for the tires you've got but especially for the ones you're considering buying I'll put a link into our episode 64 shownotes take you right to that piece and that's it see net on cars com in a moment car insurance of the future and five things to do before you drop your car off for service you've seen that on cars continue in 2011 Alfa revealed the 4c when you're not going too quickly it's a really wonderful wonderful thing and by not going too quickly I mean comfortably not very fast because it has an interesting little trait in that once you start accelerating the wheel starts grabbing and shimmying left and right and in the end you end up hanging on for dear life more than actually feeling as though you're in total control by more from the ex car team of C net UK at C Netcom / welcome back to C net on cars i'm brian coulis time for the part of the show we take one of your emails and this week it comes in from andre d who talks about the future of driving in a big way hany says all this talk about self-driving cars and driver assist technology got me thinking about insurance rates of the future do you think car insurance companies have a future interesting question Andre believe me insurance companies are at the heart of self-driving in the heart of that future vision without them the whole thing stalls because liability is not going away anytime soon the good news is insurance companies are generally behind and eager to get into an autonomous future to some degree because it reduces accidents in everyone's projections and that of course reduces claims good for us not getting injured good for them not having to pay for the injuries the tricky part is that for decades to come self-driving cars will have accidents as the technology gets debugged and matured and they'll be occupying roads with human driven cars so the accidents are still gonna happen and therefore the whole idea of drivers insurance is still going to apply even if you aren't driving now that may seem patently unfair if it happens when you're in a car that is driving itself and it runs into something it's like wait a minute it told me it was driving and I was doing something else you are still the person responsible for the vehicles operations and of course any damage it causes you cannot envision yourself as a passenger when you're in the driver's seat now if you get way out into the future to the v2i or vehicle to infrastructure era then we start to see so much data connectivity and control between cars cars - roads roads and cars - central monitoring authorities you can start to then see where the nature of insurance could change dramatically but at that point you're also starting to look at our cars being more like privately funded public transportation than the kind of independent unpredictable modules they are today okay unless you turn all the wrenches on your car and I mean from tail light to transmission but most people don't you're gonna need a good shop and know how to spot and find one but can you think of much else that inspires so much trepidation and basically feelings of inadequacy here are my top five ways to spot a good auto repair place now all of this assumes that you've done your basic googling already to figure out what kind of and number of shots are available in your area then to winnow them down start like this number five look for certifications things like ASE Triple A Better Business Bureau and your state's Bureau of auto repairs complaint records they do count for something especially if they're current and not from 1969 under the previous good owner now plenty of mediocre shops have these things in dusty frames on the wall but it's a stock number for tidy if grease a dirty shop can be a good shop but all things being equal tidy tells you something this is auto repair not Grateful Dead trip dancing a certain rigidity of process technology and workspace make good things happen there are great mechanic sewer slobs I just haven't met one yet number three lots of questions from them to you nothing gives me the willies faster than a service writer or shop owner who takes in my car with barely a curt question or two you see details up front lead to the best least repair in my experience this is also key to getting it done right the first time not the second or third infuriating time number two no flushes when they urge you to do a preventive transmission cooling system or fuel injector flush but the car maker makes no mention of in the owner materials we need to flush the shop these are signs they're likely in the upsell business more than the auto repair business before I get you to number one here's what it won't be don't sweat getting your parts back I know that's a classic old-school sort of a thing but it's predicated on a toxic relationship from the get and you're not gonna be able to recognize that greasy bag of parts even came off your car or not shady shops know that my number one tip is basic but there's nuance to it get a reference but not from your friends those same ones who are fooled by that bag of greasy parts off some other car instead hit the forums that deal with your kind of car that's probably one out there and if you find one with enough members you're probably gonna find local ones who've been to every shop in town if you do have a friend who his car repair savvy of course ask them but just because you know someone who's had their car repaired doesn't mean they know car repair ask the right people thanks for watching hope you enjoyed this episode don't forget to keep those emails coming I read every one of them and a lot of them make it into the show and look for us wherever you like to stream video whether it's on your Roku box or over at YouTube or just about anywhere and tell your friends they can do the same I'll see you next time we check the tech you