Gadgetory

Tesla's got two motors and a bit of a mind of its own hacking cars is it really that easy and the top five reasons you might want to buy a new one it's time to check the tech 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 CNET on cars welcome to CNET on cars to show all about high-tech cars and modern driving i'm brian coulis well the last time we had a Tesla Model S sin for a deep review I had a few things on my wish list more performance was not one of them but that's what we ended up getting with the new p85d a performance model with dual motors has also got an early taste of Tesla's vision of autonomy let's drive it and check the tech for all its advancements the Tesla Model S was missing some pretty basic things all wheel drive and any kind of driver a sixth I just got caught up let's drive 2015 Tesla p85d check the 10 rather quickly now on the outside as you can see these nudie model Tesla Model S's are very familiar it's what's happening underneath in two broad areas first of all the details you've got dual motors which also rolls in all wheel drive secondly a whole new wave of autonomy driver assist to the degree of self-driving even is coming in phases let's start with the drivetrain though now a Model S traditionally had a single motor at the rear driving those wheels these new D cars add a second motor at the front to drive those wheels to the tune of 188 horsepower at each end if you get a P or performance model like we have the rear motor gets bumped way up to 470 horsepower and the front a bit higher to 221 for a massive 691 total that gets this nearly 5000 pound car to 60 in just 3.2 seconds range is down but only slightly from a standard rear wheel drive model S overall charge time doesn't change much in the new car with a single charger that comes built in about eight and a half hours option the dual charger you get that down to about four Tesla supercharger gets you 170 miles of range in 30 minutes and if their battery swap stations come to fruition you'll swap the whole pack in just three minutes now all wheel drive comes in many flavors of course there's that which is aimed very much it dealing with tough conditions and that which is aimed at performance this one is clearly looking more like a performance setup though it's certainly going to help you when you've got lesser traction then there's the new autopilot which is what Tesla calls their driver assists that means adaptive cruise that maintains speed and distance to other cars along with the ability to come all the way to a full stop and resume to be honest nothing other cars didn't have a couple years ago ditto this cars new ability to read speed limit science and alert you to the correct speed now highway lane changing is interesting you can do it by just signalling our car currently just does the acceleration part for you but automatic lane change steering is coming as well self parking and a Tesla means the car not only parks in a spot that you pull alongside of but eventually will bring itself out of that spot into you at least on private property now inside the Model S nothing has changed on the p85d a quick refresher these cars are laid out differently than yours here is the giant Center LCD that can be used in one or two modes you see Google Maps is one you'll commonly have up here's one that may be an eye-opener a live web browser that even works while you drive over there in front of the driver is an all LCD instrument panel with your main sort of speed range gauge in front of you on the left you'll get navigation when you're under navigation and then on the right you've got about a handful of very quick shortcut menus that largely replace things that are buttons on other cars and the media choices on these cars are similarly monitoring of am/fm HD radio of course then standard they include streaming radio like slacker and tune in through a built-in 3G radio interestingly optional is satellite radio only with a pricey audio upgrade and of course you've also got bluetooth streaming and a couple of USB ports for mobile devices now screens that show the new features of this car under the controls menu first of all if you go to driving here's one that's very telling acceleration can be sport or insane that takes full advantage of both motors at full tilt and under settings you've got what Tesla calls their autopilot technology and that adaptive cruise control by the way should be able to take us all the way down to zero and then back up to full freeway speed as traffic conditions warrant ok I'll be honest with you if I'd done a top five improvements I wanted in the existing Model S greater performance would have been number six just listen on my list these are all good performing cars however this is now one that has notable performance as you saw in the zero to sixty numbers these PID fives by the way there p models they also have an improved sport suspension that is also highly variable in height so combine all of that with the fact that you've got that big old belly full of battery keeping this thing planted and low centered and it's just an amazingly grippy stuck to the earth performance sedan it always takes me a little time to get used to the fact that I have 86 knees no drive controls in this car you just have the pedal on the right and that's it no sport mode no Sport Plus no need me need to get this in that dialed in you just step on it harder it's amazingly elegant but we're so used to having gadgetry between us and that it's a little jarring when you drop this thing into insane mode like I showed you it's insane how could a car that weighs nearly 5,000 pounds do what that thing just did however it's also a bit of a head-fake I would trade all of that insane mode nonsense and all of the seconds they've shaved on it zero to 60 time for a vastly shorter battery charge let's not lose the real fact on electric cars these p85d which are top of the stack performance dual motor models are coming in at around a hundred and six thousand base and then we would add about another eight thousand dollars in options but due to the almost $10,000 in tax credits available at least here in California we end up actually below the MSRP but still not a cheap car this technology will also be very interesting as we see the all-wheel drive get much more accessible in the coming Model X find our full review of that 15 model s p85d top of the stack for Tesla at cars dot cnet.com you've probably noticed the other guy's headlights a lot more in recent years that's because technology has made them brighter and made them move in a moment we'll find out if they really are blinding you or if you're just imagining that when CNET on cars continues adaptive front lighting systems or these swiveling headlights that some cars have have been clearly linked to lower insurance claims on cars that have them and also been proven to give drivers earlier detection of objects ahead on the road yet a lot of folks think that these swiveling lights create more glare when the other guy has them and they still remain pretty rare on a lot of cars let's find what's going on in October 2014 the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety had 20 sample participants few cars with oncoming headlights of different types and rate the visual pain if you will on what's called the Devore visual discomfort index now high-intensity discharge headlights are really bright white ones like we have here rated higher than standard headlights as you might imagine on that discomfort scale but not in the realm of being unacceptable what's interesting is the swiveling or adaptive front lighting system headlights did not rate meaningfully higher than ones that are fixed dead ahead another finding by the IIHS is that these swiveling adaptive headlights can allow a driver to spot something as soon as a third of a second sooner on a curved road that can translate to let's say 15 feet sooner detection of a pedestrian let's say when you're driving at 30 miles an hour BMW and Lexus were among the first brands I encountered with these adaptive front lighting systems almost 10 years ago back in the 2004 model year now 10 plus years later they're still kind of rare as of 2014 14% of models of cars that were offered in the market had them standard 22% had them optional still in the minority of the market so adaptive front lighting despite its documented benefits and apparent livability still remains in the luxury tech category not the you must offer it safety tip category next time you buy a car it pays to double check if it offers these headlights that give you a bit of an edge 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 think about all the ways your cars connected these days yes start with that Wireless key fob that's one form and now look at the apps in your dash maybe your car's pected through your phone or it's got its own built-in data radio 3G or 4G and soon cars will be self-driving but then they have to talk to the infrastructure of the Internet and to each other what about the hacking potential a number of you have written in and asked about the landscape and here's a car Tech 101 that has some thoughts on that as recently as five years ago reports of cars being hacked were out there but they were viewed as either apocryphal or just unlikely to scale then this drumbeat of headlines began March 2011 UC San Diego and University of Washington teams they're able to hack into a mainstream production car via its cellular data connection getting access to drive system May 2013 nitsa establishes its first team to monitor car hacks and develop standards against them that are still pending August 2013 Charlie Miller and Chris valasek get into the backbone of a 2010 Prius and 2010 Ford Escape in a demonstration that they do through the obd2 port which is in every car mate since 96 they get access to steering braking displays and more summer 2014 a teenager spends 15 bucks at RadioShack and is reportedly able to remotely unlock and start a car at the Battelle cyber Auto challenge apparently not much of a challenge for him August 2014 prowl LinkedIn and you'll find job listings like this one from Ford that reads almost like one from a defense contract in February of 2015 in Sausalito California a thief appears to walk by a locked car holding some kind of device that isn't the key but it still unlocks it and he steals a fifteen thousand dollar racing bike from the back a typical new car today has maybe a hundred micro processors in it networked together by Al and teaming with a lot of shared information that passes by most of those chips all of this given shape by up to a hundred million lines of software code these are cyber physical systems so effectively when you're in your car you're in a computer with wheels but what is the robustness and the resiliency of that entity probably far less than the laptop that you can sitting on a table at home Mary Aiken is a cyber psychologist and real-life inspiration for the new show CSI cyber that CBS just launched on Wednesday nights I'm a cyber cop her concerns underline four things going on in the connected car the processors and networks increasingly control important stuff a car systems are increasingly interconnected get into one part of the cars electronics and you may be on your way to getting into the rest third these systems are increasingly exposed to wireless interfaces from a wireless key that can remote start your car to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi for streaming and hotspots and built-in cellular radios that power the car's telematics or concierge service and finally the internet as with everything else connected via it it's a non proprietary shared infrastructure intoxicatingly powerful efficient and scalable but shared is shared that means good guys and bad and unlike our personal computers we're just about no two are alike with different software settings security software configurations and so many parameters vehicles tend to be pretty homogenous add to that waves of cars heading to showrooms this year with apple carplay or Android auto installed potentially setting the table for yet another layer of common hack efficiency hack one the fear goes and hack them all and with cars on us roads currently at a historic high of eleven point four years old average whatever vulnerabilities are going out there will likely remain me for a long time in a moment whoring your car a cocktail which could also end up being one of my top five reasons to buy a new one CNET on cars continues the iconic British vehicle some people want to modify them and put lots of blingy bits on and other people just like the off-roading some people never take them off road and they're so adaptable everything's bolt on and you can just so easily change them into what you want it to be buy more from the ex car team of CNET UK @c Netcom / r welcome back to CNET on cars i'm brian coolie here's the part of the show we take one of your emails and this one comes in from gearhead drew he writes I just saw your excellent episode on the 2014 mercedes-benz s550 which had a great diesel engine and gave excellent insights on modern diesel advantages and improvements his question is could we do a little spot on octane in gasoline that would educate the average consumer on the myths and confusion of what octane is and what it does and he also adds by the way can my car run on Jim hmm okay first of all draw him please to say we have covered octane it was a while ago though so you may have missed it it's back in our episode 44 June of last year of 2014 don't worry about digging for it I'm going to put a link in the show notes for this episode at CNET on cars.com we did quite a deep dive on it but in a nutshell if you've got a car that is designed and says requires high octane gas you should put it in there or you are muting both its performance and its efficiency not good it's generally worth the extra money to buy the better fuel on the other hand if you're putting high-octane gas into a car that couldn't care less you're wasting money it doesn't make that engine more powerful or more efficient so don't do that either basically give the car what it's designed for you can't goose it either way by going up or down the gasoline quality ladder now ask to your more interesting question can you run your car on gin no not the car you have now however there was one car that did to go back in the 1960s the Chrysler Turbine car a low production but production car that had literally a turbine engine running it incredible rpm to drive the wheels and this was a vehicle that was able to gasps kerosene perfume just about anything you could dump in there it would find a way to burn because it was an extremely high compression engine you could run it on gin because the apocryphal story is the President of Mexico had one and ran it on tequila from time to time but unless you find one of those no it's just not a combustible enough fuel so add an olive and use it yourself now not only are we at a time of particularly low gas prices here in the US we're also at a time of very old cars on the road because we haven't been buying them in such great numbers in recent years partly because of the recession partly because cars are made so well they don't beg to be replaced as on and partly because Millennials seem to show a little less appetite first rushing out and buying a new car when they get their new license however if all those are off the plate and you're in the market or wondering if you should be here my top five reasons why you should buy a new car now I'm looking at technology and engineering see changes here I'm leaving out the financial piece and the simple factor of new car lust those are up to you let's go number five is upgradability I do put this one low because it isn't real common yet but car makers are beginning to make the most recent cars with software that can be upgraded after you purchase them particularly for the head unit Tesla is famous for doing these updates over the air Ford has sent out millions of DIY upgrade USB drives that you plug in and do yourself and many other car makers will upgrade your software when your car's in for regular service you could end up with some nice new features on the main screen the results can be great or sometimes not but without a late model car you can't even find out number four is lighting from high-intensity to automatic high-beam to headlights that steer themselves front lighting has really changed test drive a new car at night and then get back in yours it's like driving by candle light and for the oncoming car it's like being interrogated number three is LCD touchscreens now I put this in the middle of my list because having an LCD screen with touch or a controller isn't necessarily better than additional knobs and a dot matrix display see my Ford touch but in general you'll get more choices more control and more information available on an LCD than any number of old-fashioned knobs and buttons though Honda and Acura try pretty hard to overload you with both today all but the least expensive cars are shipping with at least a color LCD in the center step number two is connectedness but you say your current car already has an iPod connector and satellite radio aren't you adorable today it's all about USB ports built-in Pandora tune in and Spotify streaming apps wireless bluetooth streaming from your phone and maybe even connected nav and destination search these are things you'll use every time you drive but only in the most recent years of cars now I still don't make these number one because your smart phone can graph most of this onto an older car with at least an aux jack and a windshield map before I get you to number one two recent car tech trends that I wouldn't even make number 10 voice command and rear seat DVD systems why because they suck come on car makers get voice to work at least half as well as my phone and DVDs still really the number one tech change that is going to affect you everyday in a new car its turbo charging and direct injection this is the dynamic duo that have changed automotive power usually found in combination di and turbos have meant a wholesale move to cars with smaller engines with fewer cylinders that still deliver more power better mpg and lower emissions and this is the innovation on my list that you will literally appreciate every second your car is running thanks for watching hope you enjoyed this episode you know where to find us just about anywhere you look for streaming video online and of course keep those emails coming it's on cars at cnet.com read everyone respond to as many as I can and quite a few make it into the show as you've seen I'll see you next time we check the tech