Gadgetory

or vet zo6 supercharging an engine and a whole lot more understanding wheel alignment and the top five things that VW has to do next it's time to check the tech PC 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 seventh generation Corvettes quite a handful just the way it stands but then go and add a supercharger to it a smart suspension and smart gearbox and a body that handles air like a magician and you've got something entirely different let's drive the zo6 flavor and check the tech well we do have a supercharger here because the power is correct oh yeah few would argue this is the new golden age of horsepower but for the most part brawny cars today do it with much smaller displacement and a lot more tank under the hood except for the big vent which keeps things big so what is the zo6 it's basically king of a hill right now in the c7 seventh generation Corvette you take what's already an impressive 6.2 liter v8 base car and then you add a bunch of brawn a supercharger on top of that v8 a standard 7-speed manual with rev matching magnetic we illogical adaptive suspension standard wider fenders up front to cover way bigger wheels and treads all kinds of radical airflow and cooling management around the body and a steel-reinforced Jesus bar where the view new 416 you've got a front curb and chin camera rear lid that doesn't require you to slam it it cinches itself and carplay or Android auto with carplay out first but you don't buy a car like this to play with your smartphone yeah buy it to play with a motorized screen instead I can't get enough of that okay let's get serious 7-speed manual gearbox this is bass but notice our manual has paddles on the wheel those are your toggles to turn on or off rev matching we'll try that on the road and the track momentarily and now here is your mode controller for the vehicle and it's very simple compared to like a BMW M car there's weather eco-tour which is normal sport and track not a ton of variables around that under the home menu is something you won't find on any other car we Chevy MyLink and that's this the PDR the performance data recorder which is a misnomer it's a forward-looking video camera that also has a data recorder that overlays telemetry on the HD view forward this is basically a smart GoPro built in the car and no one else does it quite like this and generally around the cabin this is a mix of traditional and modern cabin technology a partial LCD instrument panel but real gauges around it for other functions you got your touch screen here of course but a ton of tactile knobs right below it now the simplest headline around a zo6 is that the engine is supercharged and here's your supercharger and planted right at the top and I mean right at the top look at this thing it just barely fits in the profile of the engine bay it's right here at the height of the hood gasket so when you add some mass on top you want to lower it on the bottom as a result this engine has dry sump lubrication a very shallow pan below to keep overall height managed and not add a bunch of tall center of gravity killing mass and in between those two components you've got tougher forged internals to handle the chaos that this guy brings upon them and you've also got stronger better breathing high-performance heads the output numbers are a pleasant pair 650 horse 650 pound feet of torque 7-speed manuals bass you can get an 8-speed automatic I won't be speaking to you after that however with that 8-speed in a high performance package you can get to zero to 60 down under 3 seconds for this 3500 pounds worth of Becks and should you care the average mpg is 18 that's not bad for something that puts out 650 gets there partly because of direct injection and very much because of cylinder deactivation you never get used to this kind of big big power I'll be honest I'm more of a naturally aspirated kind of guy I kind of like that smooth linear feel but this is just a hoot now we're at the simraceway performance driving Center at Sonoma a course layout that constantly reminds you how light and sharp the turn in is on this car coupled with that responsive throttle this Vette feels about half its weight I'm in let's see sport mode right now and I've got tremendous power at that great throttle ability I do not even miss the rev matcher when it's on or off because this engine blips and modulates so beautifully which is interesting for a great big engine it breathes very lightly I would say it's not hard to get it up or down on the rev clock because it's a nimble set of internals this bed has a perfect 50:50 weight spread largely because that 7-speed manual I'm working is a transaxle not a transmission in other words it's located at the back of the car instead of ganging it up all lopsided lis with the engine at the front of the car nice gearbox and clutch by the way Corvettes used to have condom kind of horsey drivelines in the last couple generations not anymore this guy is just easy to drive but man is there some stuff under there and we've got the magnet area logical adaptive suspensions doing wonders of course to keep me in good shape that's also the technology that will keep you enjoying your zo6 on the ride home after the track okay done up seeing that style of zo6 is going to start you about eighty thousand four with a 7-speed manual it's for the coupe by the way more for the convertible then there's that zero seven additional Performance Package 7,500 bucks I'm gonna pass I'm good here eighteen hundred for the PDR track recorder with telemetry laid over the video I love that I'm all-in now you're at about eighty to two out the door the way I'd do it well automotive history is littered with examples of technologies that made cars safer starting off being nice to have and then expected and then required by law look at things like airbags anti-lock brakes even seatbelts we come back I'll tell the smarter driver what's coming next on that list we see that on cars returns just as we expect new cars to have mirrors parking brake seatbelts abs and airbags regardless of their price or type we may soon expect the same of automatic emergency braking automatic emergency braking will apply partial braking and alert the driver of a potential collision 10 automakers who are responsible for more than half the cars and light trucks sold in the US have pledged to make the technology available across their lives which certainly points down the road to it eventually being required now how and when a EBE goes mainstream will be worked out with the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety they're consulting now and by the time they get that done it'll be hard for all the other car makers to stay out the u.s. new car assessment program which addresses standards for many systems includes ten formal tests of safety gear but automatic emergency braking is not yet one of them as you drive collision prevention assist is comparing your speed to vehicles or objects ahead AEV is just another term for a tech you may already know subaru calls it pre-collision braking system acura and honda collision mitigation braking system and Mercedes dubs at the wordy Distronic plus with pre-safe brake but all of these currently live in the world of a nice-to-have option not common or standard the way it works is cameras lasers and ultrasonic sensors constantly watch the space ahead of your car and if the processor they're connected to determines you're closing on an object moving or still too rapidly and seem to be making no inputs on the brake or steering the car will brake for you a car that can see trouble and stop itself to avoid it even if it doesn't eliminate the impact it would lessen its energy and if it appears you cannot avoid the collision the system engages the features of pre-safe to help prepare the occupants the safety and insurance communities have been falling in love with this tech for a few years making it the early darling of all the active driver assist the IIHS has found that cars with this basic tech are associated with up to 35% fewer accident injury claims they like paying fewer claims you like not being involved until a EB is required in new cars it pays to double check if the one you're considering buying has it any one how many times he brought your car in for a front-end alignment and what I'm kinda sure what was going on the car came out probably driving straighter and you were told it was going to wear the tires less but in the middle there was kind of a black box so let's sort that out by introducing you to the big three of alignment camber caster and toe to help us I've enlisted the guy whose shop has done dozens of alignments on my car's ron Vasconcelos of dependable tire and break in San Rafael California all right Ron first of all tell us what is tow that's the people mostly think of when their tires are out of alignment tow in tow out pigeon-toed duck toes yep okay okay tow Ian is gonna wear the tires on the outside edge yeah go out just gonna wear the tires on the inside edge so when your tires are kind of towed in pigeon-toed the outsides wear out more crack because they're kind of scrubbing as you draw exactly but why do you tow wheels in or out at all well you're pretty much toe in because you have friction as the car rolls down the road friction is pulling them apart okay as all the bushings move and all that kind of stuff if it's towed in you tow it in just a little bit and it toes out to about zero oh it doesn't everything gets pulled back by all the motion everything gets pulled back by them somewhat by the motion obviously some suspension systems are tighter than others old front-wheel drive cars used to tow them out because the wheels would pull them in from the tour from the torque pulling it in so if your towed out or if you're not totally you're gonna have less forward stability you're gonna have you have tow out the car wants to turn on siddhart watch Dart right so if you're going down the freeway the car wanders just wandering a bit you know it might have some toe out okay so let's now go to camber this is one people often misunderstand what is negative and what is positive camber negative camber the tire is leaning in at the top so it's squatting a little typically if you look at an old Volkswagen the rear wheels have negative camber a lot of it right Porsches these days have a lot of negative camber so when you have a lot of negative camber you're getting what benefit you're getting cornering benefits gonna handle better I dive into that corner that thing is kind of higher than a plant instead of if it's leaning over positive it's gonna want to roll the other way so you're kind of pre setting it for the dig that's gonna get into the road and also if you're not driving the car hard you're just driving it back and forth down the freeway well the tires already sitting that way it's gonna wear on the inside ok so it's a waste of performance if you really have an extreme negative camber correct okay so then the one that's trickiest of the of the big three is caster I still struggle with this one a little bit how do you describe caster to someone caster is the angle between the upper ball joint and the lower ball joint with the lower ball joint leading that would be positive caster this is front of the car yep the blower ball joint or the lower pivot of the steering of the steering forward is positive caster so that's like a bicycle fork correct and that is for what purpose why isn't that straight up and down stability a straight up and down caster angle would make for a wheel that nervously tracks left or right at almost any whim or input a little positive caster or lean back in the angle the wheel pivots along comes this down a car will pull towards low caster say you have four degrees on the right side and three degrees on the left side the car is going to want to drift to the left cuz think about it the ball joint is going backwards it wants to go that way and all this stuff interacts car pulls towards negative caster pulls towards positive camber so you can have one one way and one the other in the car I'll Drive straight where they're both over there go file correct now of these three why do they go wrong these are all big metal parts in here and people look at it so how could that every budge well a lot of parts these days are made of aluminum yeah aluminum soft they do like aluminum because it's lighter weight aluminum is stronger per pound and steel but but easier to bend couple that with low-profile tires to transmit more Road impact to those aluminum parts and the fact that the joints and mounts that hold your suspension in place where and then allow things to drift and that's why you need an occasional realignment so when someone hits a pothole should they be concerned and if so why um number of different things you can bend a wheel you can bend suspension parts you can break the bead and a tire you see a lot of people with bulge on the side of it what's happened is they've hit something so hard that it's broken the belts in there if I've hit something and I'm not sure if it did any damage or there any telltale things I can look or feel for um general is straight before when I was going straight now the sharing wheels off while you're going straight while you're going straight it's something got bent and giveaway shake now I hit that pothole now my car shakes is I'm doing 60 miles an hour down the freeway possibly been a wheel something like that many of us only get our cars aligned when we get new tires but notice things like pole or vibration is you drive a sign that things aren't aligned anymore and potentially costing you some tire life handling quality maybe even a little fuel economy in a moment your email white turbos aren't found in every car and is driver assist technology worth getting in your next one you can see that on cars continues it's called the Abingdon addition and it cost about 80 grand now that seems like an awful lot of money for what looks like an MGB but there's more to it than that see this is the latest in a long line of resto mod e classics this isn't just a pretty body over some crusty mechanicals this was designed from the ground up to be a real modern day performance sports card as you can probably hear from the noise it goes like sneak by more from the ex car team of C net UK at C Netcom slash welcome back to C net on cars I'm Brian Cooley one of my favorite parts of the show is right now I take a bunch of your emails and the first one comes in the blue rocker who says my son wants a 15 Toyota Camry with all the tech features he says though I'm worried even though it has pre collision blind spot and rear traffic alerts do these systems work any tips well blue rocker here's the thing when you go on a test drive make sure you and your son go on enough different kinds of roads and traffic conditions where you can test these various systems but ever the car has on it including things like forward collision prevention lane departure tech which you mentioned blind spot detection cross traffic alert which is related similar it's in the rear of the car of course and adaptive cruise control is also when I put in that basket so get on some different roads and traffic and see how it feels then you get some idea of how what's gonna work now know this these systems are considered features and driver aids for the most part they're not in quite the same class as things like airbags and anti-lock brakes where they are really guaranteed safety features that have a certain high level of performance you can expect they're very sort of conditional know that going into it and that you can't just hand your life over to these and an easy reliance they are assists they're not complete back steps I'll also take a look at our smarter drivers segment from not too long ago episode 73 we did a whole piece on the emerging popularity of forward collision braking in particular becoming very highly touted by the insurance and safety industries they think it makes a big difference next one comes in from Le II who says if turbos are so great we talk about them a lot around here why are they not standard on just about every new car by now and what would it take to install one also he says could you please explain flex-fuel okay le so turbos are an amazing technology you get more power more efficiently out of typically a smaller engine is how they're often being used today the thing with turbos though is adding them is not trivial even for a car maker with all their resources adding a turbocharger to an existing engine design is going to add some cost because the turbo itself is a very complex highly machined mechanism and it's got a lot of plumbing that goes around it it also adds a certain amount of complexity to the design and to what you're trying to shoehorn into the engine bay it's a lot of additional gear that is external to the engine itself and know that an automaker cannot just stick a turbo on a current engine and say good it's running there's a lot of R&D and testing and engineering and recertification to be done before that goes into a production line of cars and everything is done at big scale in the auto biz so they don't onesie twosie things or big projects so that's one of the things around turbochargers now there are add-on kits out there a lot of them for late-model cars you didn't mention what you drive but let's assume it's something made in the last few years you may very well find an add-on turbo kit for it they typically cost in the few thousand dollars range and also make sure you've got some good guarantees in there because these are elaborate pieces of gear that spin very high rpms and make sure the kit you buy does promised to be regulatory compliant in the state where you're going to be installing it and driving your car now in terms of flex fuel that means a world of three things that gasoline engine cars can run of course there's gasoline that's the main fuel there's a 15 which is 15 percent ethanol which is corn alcohol basically and the main flex fuel people think about at the pump is 85 this is 85 percent ethanol typically corn alcohol and 15 percent gasoline that's a very different mix for a car to run on so when you buy a flex-fuel car it does several things to allow it to digest that diet including a change in the ignition timing because there is a far higher octane to e85 than to gasoline secondly you change the fuel flow mapping because you get more fuel into the engine get the same amount of power when you're running on e85 and thirdly you have to make sure the materials in the engine are suitable to be exposed to ethanol alcohol which is a very different chemical of course than gasoline those are the main three things that constitute a flex-fuel car the last one comes in from Eddie Kay this week he says I'm wondering if there are car shows around the country that non-media people can go to to see the newest cars with the newest tech what are some good ones that I would suggest well car shows are very common all around about every metropolitan area around the US but they kind of fit into two categories there are the big shows which are where you see most of the new cars concept and new technologies come out and of course we attend those on your behalf I would include the number one Detroit Auto Show early in the year late year you have the very impressive Los Angeles Auto Show and you've also got in the spring New York and Chicago which are also significant large shows now beyond that you've got a slew of local shows that are typically put on by dealer associations as opposed to being put on by the car makers so much as a result you typically don't see a lot of new car unveils major new concepts or new technologies announced there but they're out there and it's a great way for you to see the latest cars that have already been announced and unveiled somewhere else now aside from these great emails we continue to get a slew of them from you every day about this VW admissions debacle so I thought I'd answer them kind of in a big bundle with a top five my top five things that I believe VW has to address to dig out of this hole number five find someone to run VW America the guy who was lined up to be the new boss in the US just bailed he said his wife didn't want to move here can you blame her she might run into someone from the Sierra Club and apparently VW had no Backup Exec lined up I put this down at number five because VW has to keep making progress on number four through number one whether they have a leader in the US or not but companies tend to do better with less chaos number four get to the bottom of all this who knew when did they know it and was there a C in their job title those are all key when it comes to the severity of fines and the depth of firings that are coming now VW America's current boss Michael horn told Congress a couple of Engineers were responsible for this whole cheating tech this physics couple of software engineers who put this info whatever reasons that tells me either The Wizard of Oz is his favorite movie or VW is the worst overseen engineering company in the world neither prospect seems encouraging number three compensate stakeholders everybody has their hand out many of them rightly so start with VW owners who now find themselves making monthly payments on a question mark wrapped in a stigma riding on four wheels it took just hours for class-action lawsuits to crop up all over then their stockholders they saw 40% of their value wiped out in 30 days that's like a tech stock interest in cars is killing the dealers Kelly Blue Book reports VW Interest off 18 percent TrueCar says VW diesel interest off over half Automotive News says dealers aren't happy about either number as you can imagine and the Federal Trade Commission is out there on behalf of all Americans saying that VW lied deceptive ads with all those clean diesel commercials analysts put a rough price tag of forty billion dollars on cleaning up this whole mess when everyone's paid number two get TDI back on the road let's not forget VW diesels were hot accounting for 24 percent of their US sales in 2014 so they gotta bring them back now the Oh 9 to 15 cars have known cheating software but the 16s also have software the EPA believes is at least suspect so all of them are in quarantine in the port part the VW Plant South Carolina a combination of new software new fuel injection hardware under the hood and possibly new urea injection gear under the chassis look like the complex messy path by which TDI's will come back to market and will you even like your car after that early test by Consumer Reports found that power and mpg suffered noticeably when they took some cars and tricked them into running clean number one fix the cars we already owned this matters most because current owners spent real money on what turned out to be a lie that may not work as well when it is fixed it may be worth less when they want to sell it and it's gonna make them uninterested in recommending one in the car business everything starts and ends with happy customers the u.s. the Europeans in California have given VW a variety of q4 2015 deadlines to at least get the fixes design and then plan a recall and nobody yet has ruled out a massive buyback if the fix makes the car kind of crummy it's gonna be a busy remainder of the decade for what's shaping up to be nonetheless the world's largest automaker thanks for watching really appreciate you doing so and I hope you enjoyed this episode keep those emails coming - on cars at cnet.com especially interested if you've got some insights if you're an owner of a Volkswagen TDI affected in this whole admissions debacle if you've had any interactions with Volkswagen or your local dealer Bri is out there on the front line and let us know what's going on I'll see you next time we check the tap you