Gadgetory

which of these rolling status symbols shows you do it CNET style why you're obsessing on the wrong thing about your engine and the top-five way is the man decides what technology is in your code time to check the tech we see cars differently we love along the road under the hood but also check the tackle and are known for telling like is the good bad autumn longer this is cement on cars hello everybody I'm Brian Cooley and welcome to CNET on cars the show all about high-tech cars and modern driving this week coming to you from the shop of our friend Michael Vogel little later on we're going to be digging into an engine to explain one of the biggest mysteries of them that you don't understand but first not one engine but two the big v8s that live in the bowels of the BMW 750 li and the Lexus LS 460 F Sport we put these two head-to-head the other day and never have I been so comfortable in the field well here we have two cars that really represent the pinnacle of what a lot of folks mean when they say a really nice car the 2013 BMW 750 li and the 2013 lexus LS 460 in the F Sport trim let's find out how they really differ in their essence we check the text now rather than go through these guys with an exhaustive bullet by bullet head-to-head comparison and spend an hour doing so instead I want to find out how these two cars that both can print CNET style do so differently to let you figure out which one is really right for you first off these two cars dashboards speak tech differently the Lexus says it's sort of loudly more button rich and crisp and somehow busier the BMW is by no means basic but it's tech interfaces play second fiddle to creature comforts in cars at this level the basics better be standard so you'll find GPS navigation with live traffic Bluetooth calling and a backup camera with good guidance overlays and those are standard on both cars though it wasn't that long ago that BMW nickeled and dimed you for most of that stuff and speaking of cameras are 750 has the optional walleye cams installed up front and while they're of somewhat dubious value they're not found on the Lexus you steer the Lexus interface with this inverted puck they call the remote touch controller it moves the cursor offers punch to enter and uses haptic feedback as it bumps over things on the screen but it badly needs a back button BMW has endured the years of sneers and jeers to turn I Drive into one of the best in car interfaces you steer it with this I Drive knob and handful of associated shortcut buttons including one for back and interestingly BMW has removed haptic feedback as I Drive matured I found voice command the Lexus was quick to understand me but requires parsing an address into many parts or button presses enter an address enter an address see only the city name or say change state San Francisco BMW is also quick on the uptake but lets you blurt out an address the most complicated thing you'll typically do with voice all in one phrase one zero zero zero Vaness avenue san francisco california processing your input did you mean 1000s Van Ness Avenue San Francisco most cars play the greatest hits of modern audio sources with just a few differences the Lexus is the car of these two that supports iTunes tagging with its HD radio but the BMW has a 20 gigabyte hard drive - rip - both are equally useless to most people which brings us to apps Lexus is part of Toyota that means they get the excellent Entune app suite renamed enform here it's a basket of name-brand cloud loaded apps including Yelp opentable Pandora Bing I Heart Radio and Facebook Places and that's standard BMWs app support is still optional and it just rolls up Facebook Twitter and web radio via an iPhone app no Android but built into the car regardless of phone is Google search which is killer and now Yelp as well and note that BMW has built-in 3G in the car where Lexus requires you tether your phone to get connected whether you're listening to one of those streaming apps or AM radio mark Levinson's 19 speakers and 400 watts on the Lexus or Bang & Olufsen 16 speakers and good grief 1200 watts in the BMW mean both cars can be optioned with sound better than you can hear cars like this don't just treat backseat passengers like hitchhikers the Lexus wins on total rear seat comforts optional to include reclining shiatsu massage butterfly headrests rear seat cooler and air purifier you can tell the Germans still inwardly scoff at such nonsense but have dragged themselves to include heated and cooled massage seats where they score big is the best dual rear screen entertainment system in the biz there are generous size they're nice and thin but notice what's really interesting they are iDrive interfaces with an i drive controller you've got access to multimedia radio navigation all the same services you've got in the front of the car you've also got connected Drive so without having to bring an iPad to the car you've got some modest degree of online services right here in the vehicle built-in both these cars are v8 powered the Lexus has the bigger 4.6 liter v8 but the BMW slaps a pair of turbos on it's smaller 4.4 liter the BMW ends up with more horsepower more torque and it's quicker and even though that 7 Series weighs more and is faster both cars deliver identical mpg so you got to hand it to BMW here at least on paper now to get that equal efficiency with higher power and weight BMW had to add complexity in the form of brake force electricity regeneration borrowed from hybrid cars an engine automatic start/stop which I still find rather crudely executed but luckily defeatable being luxury rides both these cars come on suave at first unless you dig down into their powertrain but when you do the BMWs power and Road handling make it a more serious driver's car to my hands even though the Lexus is an F sport both cars have a handful of engine transmission and suspension profiles from eco to aggressive and they do offer pronounced differences from one end to the other though I think three settings would probably be ample guys BMW offers a head-up display to extend the interface of the windshield as well as night vision that is now actually not totally disorienting but I really enjoy the Lexus enform apps base on the road and find its big interface and brands of content more useful than BMWs rather Stern translation of Twitter and Facebook which I don't need in the car anyway if you need help driving both cars are there for you Lexus has active Lane drift technology but passive blind spot tax the MW lane drift and blind spot are now both active in the seven each car offers adaptive cruise control the Lexus can also do front collision warning and even bring the car to a stop at city speeds if you're too busy fiddling with your coffee to watch what you're doing BMW leaves you alone to rear-end someone in independent Bavarian fashion okay the bottom line on these two cars begins with the bottom line which is quite different I checked up that BMW dial didn't seen that style and pushed 108,000 then a similar tech load on the Lexus and I couldn't quite break 90 so about an $18,000 Delta not silly money in terms of their character the BMW has a real serious executive sedan feel to it but it's a real gutter fighter on the street when you push it hard the Lexus I think a little less so even as an F sport but it has more of a schwa devii about the technology in it it's a real tech toy play it that way okay I got to admit it that shoot was one of those days where I probably should have been paying see net think about it I'm out in the 750 and an LS in a place you should recognize not by name but it's called Konzelman Road in Marin County outside San Francisco you know it from a ton of car commercials you've seen on TV we're very lucky to have it in our backyard by the way you can find our specific reviews on the 750 in the LS at cars dot cnet.com not a lot of windshield to clip a Garmin on this 61 Juliet a vintage race car not a lot of wind screen to stop bugs for that matter but I'm sure in your car there's room for either something on the dash on the phone or on the windshield that is GPS Navi related in fact if you're watching this show you've probably got two or three of the above but a few tips on using them more efficiently as always of interest to the smarter driver know what this is a lot of you probably never even seen one that's the paper map and that used to be the essence of navigation in a car are you kidding they call these screens distracting with this thing up I can hardly even see out the windshield forget that now just because you're taking advantage of the ubiquity of GPS Navi in - on your phone on a clip-on device doesn't mean you're doing it really well working with State Farm Research or Steve Roberson we've come up with interesting little toolkits simple free tips to be savvy about using GPS now clipping one of these GPS PN DS on your windshield like that by doing so you just broke the law in more than half the states in the US and even ones that do allow you to do this have very specific rules about where you can put it you probably didn't know that now whatever kind of navigation device you're using - pnd or smartphone know if it accepts destinations emailed to it in advance without you having to tediously type it in and be distracted in the process for GM Nissan OnStar Garmin Google Maps just some of the companies that support this kind of feature now if you're using your smart phone as your navigation device turn the screen off and just listen to the vocal prompts that'll come from just about any decent smartphone now back and if this little speaker is not loud enough to hear you say head Southwest on Mission Street toward first Street no problem aux cable it or Bluetooth stream it to your head unit and for most systems those nav commands will come in and override music or whatever else you have playing on this device or on your head unit and finally and this may sound low-tech and frankly it is but familiarize yourself with the route that this device is about to take you on rescuers a warning of a troubling tendency drivers who rely too heavily on the satellite guided system you've heard of death by GPS it's no joke people have lost their lives or had accidents because they've followed an inaccurate or errant map many of these navigation devices have a preview mode that lets you basically fly through where you're going to be taken so heads-up and to know your route ahead of time is good because then you really know where you are not just finding yourself somewhere and not knowing how you got there or how to get out coming up we'll explain the most misunderstood and important part of your engine's technology as CNET on cars continues you welcome back to see net on cars I'm Brian Cooley and I'm also a little embarrassed that it's taken us this long to get to the car check one on one we're about to go to you see every time I do a car video I take you to the engine and we talked about the horsepower and the torque but never have I stopped to explain to you the complicated relationship between those two and why torque is so important we're going to address all that right now okay aside from emissions and heat the two big outputs of any engine are horsepower and torque you know all about the first one you've heard about it since you were a little kid it's in every automotive advertisement everything the automaker has ever talked about has horsepower in there somewhere but torque as far less well understood though extremely important let's break them down and define them first horsepower is a measure of work its definition makes that obvious one horsepower is equal to 33 thousand foot-pounds per minute now torque is also a measure of work but it describes work as twisting force it's kind of like horsepower in a circle and without the per minute factor torque is measured in foot-pounds not a certain number of them though for example it may take 27 foot-pounds of torque to loosen a particular boat on this engine without regard for how long you have to apply that force so at the risk of oversimplifying horsepower expresses how much work you can get done on a certain amount of time torque is about how hard you can twist something and that's key because how does a car move itself the engine turns it twists the gears in the transmission they twist output or drive shafts and that moves the car torque really should be the star okay seriously let me show you on some charts how horsepower and torque work I promise you won't fall asleep now these are charts from cars and then put on dynamometer z' basically treadmills for cars you've seen these our partners over at Edmunds do a lot of kind of testing and gave us this data and it's very instructive here's a 2011 Ford Mustang here's how the chart works on the Left you've got your vertical axis of either foot-pounds of torque or amount of horsepower down across the right is basically your tachometer its rpms from 1 to 8,000 in this case now look what happens the torque line is this light blue one you start building around 2,000 rpm and you got more and more torque as you increase the revs you peak right around here at about o 4200 with 365 foot-pounds that's all that engine has and you stay at about that range until around 5200 rpm this is the sweet spot this is where you've got peak torque that just keeps coming after a while more rpms the torque begins to drop horsepower keeps increasing let's look at another car here's a very different engine in a McLaren mp4-12c supercar here's our torque line again builds gradually and then notice at about 4200 all the way out to about 6200 this guy stays flat and right about at the peak amount of torque around 415 foot pounds this is a wider what they call fatter torque band you've got more rpms where you have full torque from the engine mercedes-benz s63 instructed because this is a twin-turbo v8 look what happens with turbos this is the torque line it's out of hand it Peaks really fast and it stays broad chunky and 611 foot-pounds of torque that's a lot by the way for a very long time before it begins to degrade and finally a very different car a Scion fr-s Peaks here early at only 143 foot-pounds of torque but then look what happens you get this dip here if you ever hear me driving a car and say I feel like there's a flat spot in the torque curve that's what I'm talking about it's not flat at all it's actually a dip where the car feels kind of gutless and then up around 4800 rpm it kicks back in again and stays nice and flat all the way out to the mid 6,000 now you may have noticed in all these charts torque tends to peter out as you get to the higher rpms up near your redline that's because the engine is less able to breathe efficiently there secondly notice that horsepower keeps climbing even after torque drops off why is that seems like it's two engines doing different things well even as torque drops off the RPMs keep climbing and horsepower is largely a product of rpms times torque so we can put those two together and keep that horsepower line moving up because torque is dropping but only modestly as our PM's go up in a linear fashion okay I hope you've got a better understanding now of horsepower torque the relationship and how they impact the driving experience of a car also note we do our car videos I'll show you those two numbers and horsepower is usually the bigger torque is often the smaller unless that car has a turbo or a supercharger which artificially puts more in the engine and allows the torque to come higher or as high as the horsepower that gives you another clue as to what that car is going to be like to drive oh by the way thanks to one of our viewers whoosh ik of Arlington Virginia who nudged me to get around to that car tech 101 that topic was his idea as the little thanks for sending him one of our new CNET on cars decals you can get one as well if you send me a show idea that we use we're looking for ideas for car tech 101 or our top 5 segments shoot them at me on cars at cnet.com when we come back top 5 ways the man is calling the shots on the tech in your car when CNET on cars continues you today's graphical display radios with RDS HD tagging and cover art were unimaginable in 1957 when GM's wunderbar radio was almost like voodoo you pressed the wunderbar and a motor would turn the tuning knob stopping at the next AM Signori that's all it did there was a little slider under the wunderbar to set how staticky a radio station you were willing to have it stopped at a concept almost foreign in today's digital radio world they say today's head units are distracting I could watch this thing motor back and forth all day welcome back to see net on cars I'm Brian Cooley you know modern cars often seem like equal parts hardware software and I guess what you'd call law where laws and regulations these days have an enormous impact on what kind of cars are coming out of factories and hitting showrooms whether you or the manufacturer like it or not here's some proof you know it wasn't that long ago that folks were grumbling that requiring seat belts in cars was commie socialist stuff today that commie label is applied to decidedly more high-tech innovations I'm Brian Cooley with the top 5 ways the man is changing your car number 5 autonomous cars you know self-driving Nevada and California recently forced the issue by making these legal now the feds are playing catch-up likely to issue national rules by 2016 that's going to signal it's time to open the floodgates of investment in cars that take over 80% of the driving that you don't really want to do anyway number 4 distracted driving regulations the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been floating these tortured proposals for limiting in-car distraction like saying that a text display should have no more than 30 characters at a time or any screen based tasks should take no more than two seconds they clearly haven't used an Android phone have that whatever the specifics this federal push will be what moves distracted driving to the same level of stigma as DUI number three rear cameras this rule has been delayed more times than BlackBerry's comeback but the feds are close to requiring a backup camera in all new vehicles perhaps by late 2014 the car makers say it's going to jack up the price of a car too much but most likely they don't want to lose the ability to make the rear camera a desirable option instead of a standard feature number two are black box data recorders they're already in 90 plus percent of late-model cars probably yours that you didn't know that but the feds will soon require them in all new cars sold the gripe here is that the feds are going to require the black boxes but the state's control access to the data and barely more than a dozen of them even have laws that address it the number one way that regulations will change cars tomorrow is the new 50 four-and-a-half mpg fuel economy standard that's the level that must be met by the average of all cars sold by any maker as of 2025 this incredibly complicated formula they use to figure it out but still a huge bump from today's 29.7 fleet average and not that many years away that means we're going to see three cylinder engines turbos and almost everything hybrids galore cars that shut themselves off at a stop sign or red light and electric cars on showroom Lots even if nobody wants to buy one and it's estimated to add some $3,000 to the average MSRP by 2025 no federal rule will change cars or the cost of them as much as this one to stay on top of all the new innovations happening in cars the one you have today and the window by tomorrow check out our show at CNET on cars.com i'm brian coulis thanks for watching if you get a minute head over to Twitter Facebook or G+ and give us a little love for this episode if you enjoyed it I assume you did you're still here and don't forget I'm taking your ideas for car tech 101 and top five segments shoot them at me on car is at cnet.com if I use one of yours I'll send you one of those cool CNET on cars decals for your laptop lid and don't forget our website CNET on cars comm to find all those episodes you haven't seen yet and the feed links for the ones that are coming i'm brian coulis see you next time we check the tech you