Gadgetory

McLaren p1 electrifying supercar these in lines double use and more now engines are arranged and CNET's top-five best cars of the last 12 months it's time to check the 10 PC cars differently I 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 CNN on cars the show all about high-tech cars and modern driving I'm Brian Cooley you may have noticed the latest thing in supercars is hybrid cars look at portions 918 Ferraris laferrari and of course the Batmobile MacLaren's p1 perhaps the most audacious in many ways among this rarefied breed what they all have in common is combining a high output gas engine with an electric motor or motors to make sure they've got the best blend of power and response no matter what the performance situation let's see how the marriage is going as we drive the McLaren p1 and check the tech a mom look I got a hybrid no it's not a Prius but a nice nice whoa sports car this is let's go for a ride in the 2014 Eclair and p1 enough said first of all what is a p1 it's a lot of things a mid-engine rear-wheel drive carbon-fiber plug-in hybrid active everything supercar and when I say carbon-fiber I mean carbon-fiber everywhere the tub the superstructure of the roof all your body panels in fact there is no engine cover to speak of not one that you lift use tools to take it off when it's time for service otherwise stay out of there and McLaren tells me if you remove even the largest carbon fiber panel on this car the rear clamshell you can still pick it up easily with thumb and forefinger it's all about lightweight super stiffness and high strength you're gonna think I'm nuts but the most revealing thing I did is not drive this car but wash it when you get your hands all over this body structure it is so foreign I kept thinking of marine structures and and fish now inside the Batmobile I'll go looking for a bunch of seat controls you have one fore-and-aft that's it directly ahead of me is an all LCD instrument panel not that novel today but I'm surprised how unbusy this one is it doesn't choke you with a whole lot of information and unusual for supercars this one's got a pretty up-to-date comprehensive head unit it's kind of like a baby Tesla in its orientation it is a touchscreen as you can see media choices are pretty comprehensive navigation is pretty digestible and this is very forward looking for a car like this you got a decent app suite including a web browser also rather Tesla ask and tune in for radio station streaming and podcasts so unlike some super high-dollar high-performance cars you're not gonna be sitting there in the 1990s in terms of cabin tech but now one of the stuff it really matters in this car let's get to our power train control starting back at the wheel you've got your paddle shifters on the wheel or two buttons you'll find in no other car unless you drive a Formula One car DRS is the drag reduction system it's going to feather out the rear wing to reduce drag down the straight when you really want to halt and then you let up on it it plants you down again we'll try that later and I pass is their acronym for electric boost you can do it on demand or let it happen automatically now to get this car to really come alive you have to first put it in active mode now you're digging into the performance on the left is your handling control normal sport or track on the right is your power train control with the same three settings manual button here puts you in manual shift mode of course the arrow button over here puts it in full aerodynamic mode race puts you in the most aggressive mode entirely in fact you have to go through two confirmation screens that tell you you're on your own it gets the car super low it puts the wings super high it sharpens up all your responses and it takes off all of your stability control and finally the boost button down here is interesting when you hit that you now take the electric mode out of the equation and it only comes on on-demand and that's when you get back to the iPass button this mo does as you might imagine puts the car in electric-only mode it can go about six or seven miles battery only and of course the plug-in hybrid you can hit this button here to put it in charge mode you've got a door overhead where the charging port is takes about two hours do a full charge offshore power but of course the car will reach in its own battery along the way the way it does that's interesting it does not have brake regeneration it has coasting regeneration McLaren does that so that the brake field is always the same and never polluted by having a regen apparatus getting in between you and the pads and back here under glass is the secret sauce to our powertrain with the emphasis on power it is a 3.8 liter twin turbo v8 the engine is 727 horsepower the electric motor adds 176 the v8 engine has 531 pound-feet of torque the electric motor adds 190 to totaled up in engine math you've got 903 horsepower 722 pound-feet of torque and all of that goes out through a 7-speed dual-clutch transmission to the rear wheels only interestingly not all wheel drive your results are stunning 0 to 60 in 2.8 seconds the p1 weighs just over 3,000 pounds its mpg is 17 or a slightly better 18 mpg II but who cares let's go on the track so the new territory that works boring here is this idea of electric torque the kicks in while the turbos are still getting down to business it's a different kind of power more than you've ever known before because of that electric motors have and what McLaren tells you it's actually quite interesting is don't worry about running this car all the way out take it up to the redline every single time between the gear change you actually run it in the mid-range to mid high of your rpms and it's all there wide open on the back straight just get on it next thing you notice is this incredibly intelligent suspension which is anything about damping as well as handling an active sleeve our role of course leaves with a turn 11 hairpin there's no about awful anymore than going through every mole turn okay now to get the full barrel tasting the p1 I'm gonna set it in a race mode I've done that now basically on my own a little unnerving why boy I am a very good friend of seen it on cars a little over a million dollars what I want to try in particular is to hit the DRS on the fastback straight we get a feel for what it's like to have that thing slipstream the car and you get into a complicated thing here I got a ship with right the RS with the left bump holy God what did that come from four hours to my previous best machspeed and I'm not even good at this p1 like most MacLaren's reserves its last surprise for the ride home we're dropping in an auto mode and settling back gives you an amazingly liveable street car that wouldn't really be fatiguing to commute it if you wish to turn your office colleagues a particular shade of green okay let's say I'm convinced you want to buy a p1 here comes the heartbreak they're all long sold they only made three hundred and seventy five of these guys this is number 106 for example but the p1 really demonstrates extremely well is the existing knowledge of carbon fibre technology that we've known about but merge that lightness and strength with this stout torque of hybridization and the extreme active Aero management and this is an amazing package it also proves were on the cusp of an amazing era special thanks by the way to one of our CNET on cars viewers who loaned us his p1 drowsiness behind the wheel hasn't received the headlines or the stigma afforded drunk driving or distracted driving but maybe it should we'll find out why when see net on cars continues new methodology from the triple-a foundation for traffic safety shows 21 percent of fatal car crashes have drowsiness as a Fault in their estimation a full 33 percent of drivers aged 19 to 24 admit driving drowsy at least in the last month that's the highest demographic and 28% of American drivers overall admit to drowsy driver alert systems who use a variety of sensors and cameras to monitor your driving behavior drowsiness detection tech force arrived in model year 2008 with Volvo's driver alert control it monitors the car operators input to deduce when the drivers browsing Mercedes Ford and others followed with similar systems that are now the most popular type of drowsy detection technology Toyota and Lexus use a less common eye detection system with infrared cameras mounted on the steering column aimed toward the driver's face the cameras recognize your face by measuring where your eyelids are seeing machines is developing a full face tracking technology for passenger cars that would build on systems it already makes for truck train and mining equipment Fujitsu is starting production on what they call the feel of them device that combines a band around the drivers neck and a sensor clip to the drivers earlobe for its senses pulse and through that can predict drowsiness and then you sound or vibration to wake you up at the biometrics Institute of Valencia in Spain they're developing the hearkens system that uses sensors in the seat cover and seat belt to monitor pulse and respiration which is then computed into an indicator of drowsiness and going forward there's even development of drowsy detection and alert in future smart watch it pays to double check how you feel when you're driving and if the answer is drowsy you don't need a cup of coffee you need some rest welcome back to CNN on cars coming to you from our home at the Marin Clubhouse of the Mount Tam Motor Club just north of the Golden Gate Bridge you may have noticed watching this show that engines come in a lot of flavors the most essential of which is its configuration how the cylinders live next to each other whether it's a v8 a flat 612 cylinder rotary in-line this is a key part of the engines essential personality makes for a good car tech 101 now I would need a miniseries to cover all the pros and cons of the different engine configurations but each is good at or bad at and even then no two engine geeks on earth really agree with each other let alone me so we're not going to go super deep into that instead I'm going to lay out and visualize for you how each major engine layout is done and give you some conventional wisdom on what its benefits are okay the inline engine is perhaps the simplest most basic and most common this is an inline four one of the Ford EcoBoost motors and this gets its name because the cylinders are arranged in a line if you look down from the top inline four is are very common inline sixes are very common these engines are known for being very compact lightweight simple inexpensive to build relatively and because these engines are so compact and they're almost square if you do up from the top you can mount them either way longitudinally running the length of the car or transversely running across the car and many different cars use one or the other now the V engine you know mostly has V sixes and v8s these days although you can go all the way down to V twins and motorcycles v4 Saab launched afford have all made those back in the day but the conventional v8 looks like this here's your ford shelby v8 for example and there's your V right there in the front you've got one set of four Pistons and cylinders that are laying over this way another set laying over this way it's kind of like it took two in-line fours married them to one crankshaft and just tilted them apart so they could live in one space the key here is that you're fitting a lot of cylinders into a relatively compact space especially when you get to higher cylinder counts like six or eight or ten this v8 if you made it into an inline eight would be like this long it wouldn't fit in just about any car out there but by nesting it in a V configuration you gain some width but you lose a lot of length the other key nuance around the engines this varies by maker is the angle of this V are those cylinders almost touching are they laid out much further apart the angle of d is one of the secret sauce items for engine designers v8s and v6s are also known as being inherently pretty well balanced and of course because they pack a lot of cylinders into a smaller space they do get a lot of power they're known as high-performance engines in most cases the W is in many ways a derivation of the V the most common example these days is the VW Group design that includes a w8 in some Audi r8 a w12 and some Bentley's and a W 16 in the Bugatti Veyron now visualize this w as a pair of V engines that are mated together to drive a single crankshaft and in this VW design each of those V sets of cylinders are nested so they overlap a bit if you run an imaginary line sort of down the set of them this W has the V engines benefits of putting a lot of cylinders in a short space but also its own benefits of putting a lot of cylinders in a narrower nested space now the rotary engine in the car world this really means the Wankel rotary engine that has been used in Mazdas for several decades inside an egg-shaped combustion chamber there's a triangle-shaped rotor that turns or rotates with the combustion in the spaces that it creates as it spins and geared down the middle of that rotor is the shaft that turns and feeds the transmission now because Wankel rotary don't have a bunch of pistons and other parts that are jerking up and down violently changing direction every split-second they can spin at higher rpms and do so smoothly without self-destructing on the downside they've long struggled with high-ish fuel consumption and emissions and a struggle for a lot of power largely due to the trickiness of sealing those three tips of the rotor as it sweeps around the inside of the engine and it's terrain of spark plug ports and intake and exhaust openings now let's talk about a flat engine also there's a boxer or a horizontally opposed engine this is one of the most famous right here in a Ferrari Testarossa it's a flat 12 you've got six cylinders on each side as you can kind of see there and on the other side are six more and they are exactly flatly opposed to each other 180 degrees apart the point here is you've got a very low engine because nothing sticks up it can be a low motor that sits low in the car giving you a lower center of gravity great for performance and cornering it's also an engine that is good if you're trying to package the body low for a low sleek design take a look at let's say a Subaru BRZ they were able to get a low center of gravity and low nose because they've got a flat engine in there these are called boxers because they have pairs of cylinders Pistons in them that are punching together at one time in any given direction flight engines are also known for being very balanced because their pistons and connecting rods are literally in exact opposition things tend to just work themselves out and not have a lot of weird vibration or moments that have to be counteracted with other apparatus like counterweights these are engines that are known very well from Subarus they have fours and sixes that are their famous boxers and of course the Porsche 911 is a flat six to build on this basic understanding of engine layouts make sure you check out our car tech 101 on turbos and superchargers that was back in episode 15 and our car tech 101 on horsepower versus torque that was in episode 12 in a moment CNET's top five rated cars of the last year when CNET on cars continues it's time to take a look back over 2014 and remember some of the awesome classic cars the ex car team have been lucky enough to get their mitts on before crowning one car our best classic drive of 2014 buy more from the ex car team of CNET UK @c Netcom / r welcome back to CNET on cars i'm brian coolie this is the point in the show we grab one of your emails this one coming in from Steven M who writes a quick comment about your recent review of Auto Technologies at CES the first thing I noticed was the gesture control demonstration and the swipe left and swipe right gestures that move the cursor one category over what seemed to be the homepage of a navigation unit does that seem a bit too little or is it just me he says if I had to make a big old swiping motion every time I wanted to go between nav and radio I'd look like a dog pawing at a t-bone steak yes maybe you can do something a little more kind of like the way Macintosh OS 10 spaces works well Steven I'm with you in many of your concerns about gesture controlling cars now it's prototype stuff right now but we've seen several examples like the one you saw from CES and I just have a concern that it's different than using a knob a button or a touchscreen but not necessarily better now it's early days for this technology but the developers of gesturing cars to get several things right first of all make it very easy for the gesture control to know when you're gesturing for a control versus gesturing while you talk that's got to be teased apart secondly it's got to be dead-on positive the first time if I make a gesture and have to constantly look and see if it took and maybe do it again now you've just doubled my mental load for gesture as well as my distraction looking away from the road and that's going wrong this of course is our first regular show of 2015 so it's that time of year we always look back to the past year at 2014's highest rated cars according to scenic here are the top 5 out of the nearly 100 can we check the tech on in the last 12 months you know it's a sign of the times that this I believe is the most diverse list of top rated cars we've ever had it's kind of like Noah's car carrier we've got a diesel and a battery and a hybrid and a gas engine car and mixes of all those all making the list so let's go number 5 the 2014 BMW 535 d this is the car that proved to us here that a diesel makes for a great sports sedan fantastic torque great handling average mpg in the low 30s real world and the diesel options only about 1,500 bucks more so you might actually earn it back and beyond in the time you have the car of course it's BMW so they make up for it by insulting you with an extra charge for a rear camera number for the 2014 Tesla Model S nobody does battery range like Tesla so it's a car you can really live with and go fast in and look good in now like all EVs it still suffers from charge time that is a huge multiple of gas time even at one of their superchargers but if you want to crash a meeting of Silicon Valley VCS this is your best cover number three the 2015 Kia Soul evie no Tesla but it's not a hundred grand either for around 27,000 after federal tax credit you get 93 miles of range snappily delivered with good performance and that Kia Soul design that has made it the king of its segment this is one of the few cars out there that really feels like it was meant to be electric number two is a 2015 BMW i8 show up in this and people will think you just held up an Auto Show the i8 is this traffic stopping ball of carbon fibre battery electrification and sensuous concept car lines unusual for the Germans it's a plug-in hybrid that can put that tech to work toward efficiency or toward really remarkable performance so in a sense you get to gullwing cars for your hundred and forty grand but it's still the priciest car in our list before I take you to our darling of 2014 here are three cars that were marked by remarkable suckage each earning a middling OK rating with just two and a half stars the 2015 Infiniti q70 formance and bad ride quality there's a twofer the 2014 Fiat 500l roomy for a Fiat and a great sunroof but otherwise a great argument for a Kia Soul and the 2014 Ford Fiesta se EcoBoost you better like shifting a gutless car without Navarrete modern interface to fall in love with this one our number1 CNET rated car of 2014 was the 2014 Audi rs7 Quattro I shot the video for this guy back in March of 14 and I could have told you then it would likely a cyst it doesn't do too much well just engine transmission connectivity interface efficiency styling and utility it does have a problem one hundred and five thousand of them actually but aside from price this is a car that does the art of automotive engineering proud thanks for watching hope you enjoyed this episode keep those emails coming it's on cars at cnet.com I read everyone respond to as many as I can and of course a lot of them make it into the show as email replies or segment suggestions as I'm sure you've noticed and of course wherever you look for video look for us we're probably there I'll see you next time we check the tech