Gadgetory

Marcedes RiRi launches my box will it work this time airbags in places you never expected them and is it time for dash cams to start coming from the factory it's time to check the temp 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 CNN on cars welcome to see net on cards to show all about high-tech cars and modern driving I'm Bryan Coolidge now most of us were never going to buy a car like a Maybach the problem is most the folks they thought were going to buy one didn't buy one either and they killed off the very luxury derivative of Daimler back in 2012 but now the name is back as a Mercedes derivative an ultra high-end version of the s-class this should be fun let's drive the all-new Mercedes Maybach F 600 with a big old brawny bite turbo 12 and check the tech I'd give you the short story on the Maybach s600 in ten seconds it's an eight inch longer fully loaded s-class 600 and the eight inches longer gives you a whole bunch more room in the back that's where the focus is on the extra length notably it doesn't pick up a whole lot of extra weight it only weighs about 230 pounds more than the short s-class otherwise the sheet metal on an s-class versus a Maybach is so similar you should look for the badges the one here on the sale panel and the one on the rump you won't find those on any other Mercedes now getting into a Maybach s600 is not shockingly different than an s-class first thing your eyes were drawn to are the dual twelve point three inch widescreen LCD I don't think I've got that much LCD real estate in my TV room the one on the left of course of your virtual gauges which occasionally move out of the way to allow night vision to take over the center this big screen we've seen before it's the command system that has navigation that is well rendered but doesn't strike any new ground beyond all the in-car broadcast satellite and external media sources you've also got the ability to have tuned in as a streaming radio choice and an in-car hotspot but that's part of a telematics subscription at 450 a year now all of this is driven by two controllers no touch German remember I must say you might think this trackpad is gilding the lily with a control knob right near it but this does wonders that touch pad is also good for handwriting and pinch and zoom on the map it's right about now diving into all the menus you can access with these controls that you realize there's too damn much going on in this call if you are working hard enough to afford this you don't have time to be playing with your car's menus you're making money chief example go to the HVAC ribbon of buttons here and just press the one that says menu then spend the next afternoon or so figuring out all the ways you can set up the climate in this car from the temperature to the air distribution to the air flow you can blow hard soft or moderate to footwell airflow climate mode the air freshener which is separate from the ionizer really and similar layers and layers and layers of possibility occur on almost every system in the infotainment head unit you don't need a loan to buy this car you need a degree in engineering and you know you're not an Alexis in this car completely different design language of course but the seats are hard Alexis always has plush seats this one does not now let's talk about some visual tech going on in this car I told you about the night vision that we have in between the main gauges we've also got the best 360 bird's-eye view camera in the business look how beautifully it stitches before cameras together it doesn't even appear to be four angles that's pretty slick and we've got the magic sky control sunroof front and rear hit this little button right by the sunroof control and it goes from dark blue to nearly clear electronically they apply high voltage to a crystalline structure inside the glass panel to have it either reflect or pass light I bet your Hyundai doesn't have that and my last visual trick to show you is this one you find that little icon looks like a book and now you've enabled split view on the passenger side right now I'm seeing media from the driver's side right now you might be seeing navigation same screen same time but at this 45 degree angle it feeds two different displays that's pretty hot the audio in this car is off the charts and that's bass fifteen hundred and forty watts twenty four speakers from Burma ster there's even a ceiling speaker in the rear and a separate sub in the trunk that gets its own 400 watt feed the tweeters even rotate I'm not sure why and this is a low tech but really cool the hinge on the console changes depending on where you open it I couldn't get enough of this I played with it all day now driving the my box not much different than any other s-class you've got this sort of old-school electronic column shifter here paddles on the wheel by the way over here in the center console you've got a sport or economy mode for the powertrain and below that is a BC not a spelling lesson that's automatic body control that's the active suspension either sport or comfort the adaptive suspension on this car is not just mechanically based he uses a camera to look at the road and to know when there's a big bump or divot coming and pre adjust the suspension not wait for the impact to happen this drives me nuts though about the rear compartment and the front for that matter you don't have infinite door checks you got old-school three-position notched hinges this thing is gonna cut your shin off and did it to me several times that since you have to work 18 hours a day to afford one of these they give you some nice tables to do your work upon and what's interesting about these compared to some other cars of this luxury category is that these are pretty darn good this is like what you get in the airplane aluminized and they come to the right place dual tablet like screen these are not iPads these are Mercedes proprietary screens that can be playing either plugged in media DVD or get you access to almost anything at the front or let you bring up media that gets sent to the front for Master System distribution let me tell you is it better than my office cupholders are so passe instead you want a heated and cooled cup holder just press the button for which you want and a little light inside changes accordingly as well people are nuts and of course in the car like this you got to offer the coup de Gras of luxury silliness the bottle cooler the fridge right here behind your elbow holds a couple of what it looks like to be full-size bottles of champagne though I'm sure they don't officially endorse that problem is look how much room in the trunk it takes up there's barely enough room for the owners ego in there anymore the Maybach s 600 shares an engine with a standard s 600 luckily it's a lot of engine a six-litre twin-turbo v12 doing 523 horsepower and 612 pound-feet of torque rear wheel drive only through a 7-speed automatic zero to sixty and five seconds is only a half a second slower than a short s-class and the weight at 50 to 69 is only 28 more pounds per inch of added length 13 20 mpg escapes single digits but not by enough to escape a gas guzzler tax first thing I noticed in terms of its driving behavior though is if you have it in this economy mode and if you have auto start/stop enabled this may be the most raggedly driving experience on the road part of that is to make it a more comfortable less transitional ride between stop and go when you put it in sport mode though and trounce it good grief how can something this big go that fast is what you think we do have a head-up display on this car which is nothing necessarily new for Mercedes but I will say they need to go take some lessons from BMW it's not real satisfying the overall smoothness is incredible as you'd expect partly because we've got over 5,000 pounds to dampen out row and undulation in all the power that is available varied as it may be the heaviness the adaptive ride control and of course who knows how many hundreds or thousands of sound deadening and insulation add up to a sublime driving experience ok bass if you can call it that a Maybach s 600 is about one hundred and ninety-three thousand dollar proposition but of course we got to go see that style we're gonna add a few grand to that in the following fashion those rear tables and heated and cooled cup holder got to have those for two grand the fridge is 1,100 I'm gonna skip that all day long and some trunk space split view I love it 700 bucks magic sky control is a pricey overhead toy 5000 but boy is that slick and of course the gas guzzler tax that's 1700 bucks you could have spent in a lot better ways all in about two hundred and three grand the way we would do it now if you're going to buy a car like this you sure don't need my opinion whether you need it or not it's not a need product but it's a whole lot less ostentatious and over-the-top than the old maybach 57 s and 62 s it utterly separates driving from the chore of driving find our full review on that Mercedes Maybach s 600 over at cars dot cnet.com we've become used to airbags popping up all over around the front seats and - like mushrooms in the last 10 years but there was one part of a car that was curiously basically devoid of them even that's changing that's the smarter driver is about to find out when CNET on cars returns air bags positively litter the front row of late-model cars but here in the back you kind of get table scraps maybe one of those side curtain air bags reaches back this far and maybe one of the recent and rare seat belt air bags the shoulder strap is actually an air bag housed within what looks like a traditional belt but if there's an accident sensors determine when the inflatable belt should deploy signaling the belts tubular air bag to inflate with compressed gas IHS survey found 12% of people injured in crashes were in the back seat an even more notable rate when you recall that often that seats empty so automotive industry supply our TRW has now developed two rear air bags one deploys down from the roof the other out from the back of the front seat now these vaccine air bags look a little odd right but the dynamics that led them to that shape were based on a study of German car accidents from 99 to 2013 a lot of years TRW found that the majority of folks who were injured in the back seat in the crash either got hurt by slamming into the back of this front seat or because they only had a shoulder belt on and nothing else restraining them all the force was concentrated here and they got a thorax or chest injury the airbag seeks to distribute that force much more gently in smaller cars TRW expects the seat mounted airbag is going to work out better in larger vehicles the roof-mounted design could be a better idea by the way a rear airbags are not just about protecting people in the back according to Japan's Institute for traffic accident research and data analysis serious injuries and fatalities to front seat occupants declined by 25 to 28 percent when the rear passenger is restrained because they in the front no longer had this one or 200 pound projectile in the back hitting their seat and causing more impact airbags back here would be expected to even further reduce front passenger injury due to rear passengers these new bags are likely to arrive in Europe first where some new rear seat crash standards are rolling out soon the US has yet to develop a framework for even evaluating them but the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute is working on that so why is it taken so long to get rear air bags into momentum like this well two major factors one is economics our makers aren't really crazy about jacking up the MSRP by adding features even if their safety features sometimes that are not going to be used very often underappreciated an unsung if you will secondly 14 states in the u.s. right now don't even require that you use a backseat seat belt so in many ways this is the low-hanging fruit even before we put some inflatables back here it pays to double-check your States rear seat belt laws the availability of rear airbags in the car you buy in a few years and regardless of either that your passengers are using the restraints they've already got in the back 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 California has long been a big trendsetter in the auto industry very much dictating styles but more importantly emission standards which has led to a curious beast known colloquially as a compliance car makes for a very interesting and intriguing car Tech 101 whenever you find the word compliance it usually suggests someone is doing something they didn't want to do because someone else made them do it in this case the someone who did the telling was the state of California which in 2012 told all the large and intermediate sized car makers in the state that a certain percentage of their annual sales had to be zero emissions vehicles that means battery electric cars or the even more rare hydrogen fuel cell vehicles all of a sudden oddities like electric Fiats and smart fortwo news and Honda fits and rav4 is cropped up car makers that fail to sell the minimum percentage of zero emissions vehicles and this is figured out by a formula far too complex to relate here would then be subject to penalties that they can satisfy by buying expensive zero emissions credits from companies that do sell more than their share of zoo emissions vehicles for example Tesla has made millions of dollars the last couple of years selling credits because all they makers do emissions vehicles and they can sell them to car companies that make gas engine cars and not enough that don't spew not to say all zero emissions cars are compliance concessions the all-electric Nissan Leaf and Tesla Model S are bonafide sellers but those two cars make up some 70% of the US evie market leading the rest of the list to be painted with the compliance car brush here's where it gets tricky plug-in hybrids they use both emitting gas and zero emissions electricity they can run some all or virtually none of their miles zero emissions depending on the owner uses the car not depending on the technology the automaker built in so it's not in the car makers control now recently those automakers in California gone to the state and said hey give us a much bigger credit towards zero emissions when we sell a plug-in hybrid because they're using studies now that show frequently when plug-in hybrids are used in the real world they are in a zero emissions State that is closer to that of pure V's and fuel cells in a moment where are the dash cams and my top five luxury car tech options when CNET on cars continues from 2005 to 2015 just 450 of these were built and over that decade it became a household name the most famous car on the planet and right now I'm going to show you the face you make fust buy more from the ex car team of CNET UK at cnet.com slash welcome back to see net on cars i'm brian coulis part of the show we take one of your emails this one comes in from julius in massachusetts who writes I was wondering why car manufacturers don't offer dash cams on their models he means factory built in there are so many cameras on new cars nowadays and since some cars have hard drives built in why not use them he says together to help see who's at fault or to remotely view your vehicle from a smartphone well Julius a couple of things I believe are going on here first of all once you leave the US is a huge appetite for dash cams strangely in the u.s. we're not that into them once you kind of get away from people like us who watch this show who are really into internet smartphone connectivity and car technology there's not that much awareness of dash cams at least in the US market right now so if you're out there looking at the marketplace the automaker wants to develop form they're probably gonna put their R&D dollars a lot of other places before they start developing a lot of built in dash cams another aspect here is a legal one if they put in cameras in cars that connect to storage hard drives like you mentioned and Internet connectivity they've suddenly made a very elaborate surveillance system that you might then point at someone who has an expectation of privacy out there in the world and now you've got a problem with a car maker might be brought into some kind of a lawsuit for invasion of that privacy now there are a ton of dash cams out there at very low prices it's another reason why car makers where we don't see a great market here how do you compete with a pretty good $100 clip on dash cam you can stick on your windshield and the markets littered with those by the way we did a piece on dash cams back in August of 2014 I'll put a link to that in our show notes for this episode over at C net on cars.com now one car we have driven that does have a factory cam of sorts kind of like what you're looking for is the 15 and newer Corvettes they have a track cam option again it's oriented for track use not for security or for collision evidence use but it gives you a beautiful view of what the driver sees going forward and overlays great driving telemetry on top of that image my colleague Tim Stevens did a nice look at that I'll also put a link in our show notes now since we spent some time cosseted in that mercedes maybach s600 earlier in this episode i'm going to be a good time to run down a list of some of the most over-the-top luxury technology options out there in the auto biz out here's my top five list of luxury tech these are my top five technologies that I think really set serious lock Sheree cars apart from what the rest of us drive number five is big-name audio and I put this down at five because high-end audio is popping up all over different priced cars with meridian beats fender be a no-name and others getting into the cabin but the really expensive audio rigs that had five - even $10,000 to a cars price that's still top-shelf ironically most buyers who can afford such cars are at an age where they can't even hear a high-pitch doorbell but those speaker grilles are sure impressive number four a v12 engine the trend these days is to get more power from fewer cylinders all the way down to three even Ford's new supercar only has six so what are some of these luxo barges doing with 12 because that says I make more money than you do oh and it also has a certain innate smoothness number three is night-vision tech now head-up displays are moving to the mainstream but these James Bondy and night vision screens still remain in your financial planners dashboard not in the one in the mid Sbisa he said you can afford number two lounge rear seats still the very emblem of class warfare because they're all about luxury and repose while not even driving your own car and they'll always remain in this vaunted position because you can't install them in a car that isn't already huge before I get you to number one here's a luxury car option that isn't even in the car when rich folks have bought the most high-end car they can find they then raise the stakes further with where you keep it I hate it when I envy cars bedroom number one is of course the fridge the backseat cooler it takes the cake because it's just as sybaritic as those lounge seats but even less necessary I mean come on there's a 7-eleven full of cold drinks every three blocks across this country you'll make it but you probably don't want to emerge from behind your privacy screen should add those to the list thanks for watching hope you enjoyed this episode tell a friend who doesn't know about us send them right over to see net on cars.com that'll be your good deed for the day I'll see you next time we check the tap