Gadgetory

okay sake 2015 Hyundai Sonata the end of the apologies hypermiling not just for hybrid heads anymore and the top 5 distracting in-car interfaces 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 C net on cars welcome to C net on cars the show all about high-tech cars and modern driving i'm brian coulis Hyundai's been making great cars for a number of years now but you still had to explain your choice that may be changing with the 2015 Sonata a heavily revised model that plays into the heart of the best-selling cars in Auto dump let's drive this all-new version and check the tech sometimes when you want a major hit in the auto business you don't have to be hot looking or super fast or anything superlative you just have to be a nice car let's see how they all new heavily revised 2015 Hyundai Sonata goes after that bull's eye do they hit it now the Sonata as you may recall got serious in the market with the 2009 model all of a sudden it became a real threat to Camry accord Fusion and the rest but it always had this unfortunate Hyundai trait of looking a little bit ornamented shall we say just not a handsome car that's changed now and that's the big story on the outside of the new Sonata refined more urban lines now call your attention to a couple of exterior features first of all the panoramic roof which is optional even on this limited trim there's one bar in the middle but it opens up a lot of sky and an interesting take on the trunk just walk up to the rear of the car with the key in your pocket and stand there for three seconds and the trunk opens automatically if you don't recall what the previous Sonata look like here's a look now here's what we have today this is completely different kind of Teutonic it's got a little bit of an Audi layout to it it's clean it's handsome it's modern its angular that theme continues now our cards pretty loaded up is a limited with almost every ox in the CNET style navigation system as you see here Hyundai's always did a pretty good clean job of that and they've tended to have the fastest touchscreen response in the industry by a big margin I'm afraid to report that that's a little bit muted now it's just you wouldn't notice it watching me on camera here but I can tell you shut up just little milliseconds little heartbeats worth of difference or happening now when you touch the screen I will say this when your navigation mode it's got a new I believe split screen option plus auto zoom and a lot of things going on makes it kind of busy your standard audio is going to be iPod and USB and aux jack all down here in this new and large bin Sirius XM and standard and bluetooth streaming are also standard HD radio and more comes at an optional level which includes our navigation that we've got in here now check this out you don't recognize that little orange icon right there that sound hound let's say I'm listening to something on a station that doesn't do a good job of putting those RDS tags on the screen so I can hit the sound hound button and it's going to listen to the broadcast for certain amount of seconds here get a nice sample figures out what it is pulls it right up on the screen and it's a really cool tool to have in the car where you don't want to be fumbling with your app on your phone to do the same thing you can mark it as a favorite go back later figure out what it is there is something as advanced as an online buying store for the track just yet but maybe it's a matter of time this car also supports Siri eyes free with your iPhone and later in this model years run in 2015 they'll also support apple carplay they're one of the early adopters on that another interesting feature especially for a popularly priced car you've got start/stop and replay on satellite radio at 22 minute buffer here to let you capture and go back install the blue link telematics app and you get a wide array of sort of auto remote control functions and most importantly you can get a live online search utility that can tie into the cars navigation system there's also remote start via the app with the interesting wrinkle of a delay timer of 1 to 10 minutes now under the hood all sonatas continue on as four cylinders only this or the 2-liter turbo sport that's a different video here we have an interesting story the horsepower and torque have come down a little bit to 185 horse and 178 pound-feet of torque down 5 and 1 respectively but what Hyundai says they've done is move the responsiveness lower in the rpm band where real people drive not revving their car out to a yellow or red line but loafing along the numbers changed a bit as they did that these guys are all front-wheel drive and go out through a 6-speed automatic with a little shift gate but there are no paddles on the wheel you've got some drive modes sport eco and normal very straightforward 0 to 60 happens in 8.1 seconds a car the way it's about 3400 pounds but delivering quite good fuel economy 24:35 you're not seeing any turbos no brake energy regeneration no electrification of any kind though auto start-stop pretty straightforward powertrain but gets it done now that whole theorem about just be a nice car really is where the sonata prints on the road its overall quietness and ride quality are really exemplary the power band is used for I want it to be the transmission is unobtrusive it never leaves the car flat-footed when you need power there's a meaningful difference between eco normal and sport the steering is surprisingly heavy for a car made today of many cars have over assisted very light steering I think it's part of giving the car a feeling of more mass and more quality to the driver now the driver assist technologies are primarily passive the one exception is your active cruise control which will go all the way down to a full stop of the tone braking and back up to full freeway speed should conditions warrant what's interesting is what they've done with the blind spot technology here it's a little more um contemplative if you will when you have that and it indicates that you do a turn with your stalk here it's going to read not just where cars are so if a car off your side is closing rapidly I'll have a different sensitivity toward warning than if it's not okay let's price our 2015 Sonata this heavily revised version we have a limited which is a really good place to start 27:3 with destination but there are two chunky options you've got to go for packages they really take it seen that style one as you can imagine is called the tech package that's 3500 bucks with a panoramic roof the 8 inch nav screen xenon high-intensity discharge headlights HD radio with infinity sound backing it up a heated steering wheel and ventilated seats and the ultimate package for the lower 1500 is a lot of your smart driving stuff adaptive cruise lane departure warning forward collision warning automatic high beams and Ritter park sensors on top of the already existing rear camera all in about 32 for recei net style Sonata Limited the other one you want to look at however is the Sport 2.0 T smaller but turbocharged engine more power roar to your performance in fact they think it'll be their biggest seller among all the sonatas bottom line is this is the Sonata that should end excuses for buying a Hyundai this is an outstanding car in the top-tier with all the other big boys don't forget they got a hell of a warranty five years 60,000 mile bumper-to-bumper and 10 100 powertrain we don't normally talk about warranties but this one is so outstanding it's worth a mention find our full take on the new 15 sonata at carzy Netcom where you can also look up our latest reviews on the cars that want to knock its block off like fusion camry accord and ultima among the flurry of recent recalls one transcends make or model the airbag recall that can turn safety tech into a hazard facing you square in the face is that your car will tell you how to find out when we come back 7.8 million cars on us roads have an airbag made by Takata corporation they can explode when activated rather than deploying properly and sometimes a metal piece will be thrown out like a piece of shrapnel the company blames moisture during manufacture and in the cars driving environment from making the igniter and propellant unstable now to find out if your car is one of the 54 models of one of these airbags go to safercar.gov or call the hotline at Triple Eight three to seven or two three six have your cars VIN number handy know that you cannot deactivate a driver's side airbag but your dealer may tell you to cease carrying passengers in the front seat of an affected car until the airbag is replaced it pays to double check if your car has an airbag with a potentially explosive problem 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 if you've ever heard the term hypermiling I bet you heard it from a Prius owner possibly a fanatic Prius owner they get some amazing real-world MPGs not by modifying their car but by modifying their own driving behavior which means it's transferable to any car makes for a miserly how to segment you can put to use today hypermiling could also be called momentum conservation because that's the core of what you're doing it starts with mechanical techniques make sure you're at full or even upper pressure on your tires consider using a lower weight approved motor oil to reduce drag on the engine park in the shade and maintain the gasket on your fuel cap to reduce fuel evaporation use a narrower but approved sized tire instead of the widest approved one no idle roof racks cargo holders bike racks or kayaks that ruin aerodynamics some folks even gas up often and only as much as needed to reduce weight and it probably won't hurt to go on a diet and reduce your own weight then there are the driving techniques here's where you get to the core of it modulating your momentum another way to put it is to use the brake and the accelerator pedal as little as possible look down the field as you're driving and don't go so fast that you know you're gonna have to needlessly brake up there that turns precious gas into brake dust and heat even cars with regenerative braking throw away energy when you slow down with the brakes and how do you replace that energy by burning more gas so seek the least and gentle acceleration and braking in traffic hit the sweet spot that means keeping the car very generally between about 35 and maybe 60 miles per hour going much faster drags down mpg due to wind resistance going a lot slower isn't good because combustion engines are inefficient at low speed ranges use tall gears this will dampen responsiveness but that's not the point here your modern automatic will already seek the tallest useable gear when you're in normal or eco mode but stay out of sport and stay off those panels now if you've read about hypermiling or people gain the most out of their Hybrid ever you've probably read about a technique called pulse and glide this is getting on the throttle kind of hard to get up to speed with the engine running it's sweet spot then coasting until you're down to a speed where you've got to pick it up again and repeat the cycle it requires fairly open traffic conditions of course and is maximized by having the car in neutral or even turning off the engine during the glide part because coasting in gear introduces quite a bit of engine drag it reduces the games however coasting in neutral or turning off your engine on the road are illegal inadvisable or both another technique I do not recommend on regular public roads is drafting this is tucking in tight behind a large or at least larger vehicle to reduce your wind resistance but to do it you really have to violate the three-second Gap rule on public roads just not cool especially behind the vehicle that isn't in on the game as you can see hypermiling has a lot of little pieces to it you've got to make something second nature that aren't right now and you've got to get some new muscle memory if you will but the nice thing about it is you can use an undemanding the current car you already have why not try it see how much you can wring out of your current vehicle you might need to buy that hybrid after all and when you do want to crack it open on a fun country road you can still do that as well it's not like you had to make a hard mechanical commitment to a different kind of machine in a moment a quick shortcut to the list of the best MPG cars gas diesel or electrifying when CNET on cars returns I am Bruce Meyers I'm a Southern Californian that created this little car behind me called the Meyers Manx it's the world's first fiberglass dune buggy you can go buy yourself a Porsche or a Jeep or a Corvette but all those cars are made in factories these are all made in the family garage so there's something different there is there buy more from the ex car team of CNET UK at cnet.com slash welcome back to CNET on cars I'm Brian coulis time for some of your email this one coming in all the way from Saudi Arabia where Hani writes in can you do a top 5 best mpg cars that are strictly gas-powered meaning no electrics or anything like that and can you also do one for diesel cars well honey we typically do a year and top five of the best mpg cars but you don't need to wait you can actually use the US government rankings and look this up anytime you want which is a pretty good barometer so go over to fuel economy gov click on find a car then drop down to best and worst vehicles and from those results you can choose cars excluding V's right there at the top now as I mentioned this is not a ranking unique to your market it's a US market barometer but as car makers get increasingly globalized with their cars and sell more of the same cars and similar configurations around the world this is becoming a better and better barometer at least of who's on the top who's on the bottom who's in the middle also note that we have a lot fewer diesels in the US so some models you're thinking of may not be in our list at all last episode we brought you the new top 5 in car media sources but how distracting are the new interfaces you use to get to them here's a top 5 of recently evaluated and highly distracting dashboard display they told us voice technology was going to solve in-car distraction they lied new research for the triple-a and university of utah shows that talking to your car keeps your mind on that and less on driving it here are the top five distractions in the dash that our voice oriented rated on a scale of relative distraction value number five climate or radio commands via voice I've always found these kind of ridiculous I mean radio and climate is pretty darn easy without talking to the car command clean in the time it takes you to simply activate voice command you could already change the station or the temp number for destination search via voice even if it's error free it's real tricky getting the voice command gear to understand every command you say every detail of street and that happens about once a year that it gets it right remains a complex task number three emails and texts this should be a no-brainer I'm actually surprised they aren't number one a range of scores here is because it varies whether you're composing or listening and whether you have a natural or one of those computerized voices coming out of your car either way composing is always foreground obviously as can be listening when the texture email is infuriating number two is just sheer menu navigation let's face it you can't just talk to your car it ain't that smart on most cars you need to give it the exact stilted command it wants to hear from a strict menu of choices that means you either memorize all those right or glanced at those on-screen prompts that's sort of like getting around a foreign country with nothing but a phrase book and you know how well that goes before I get you to our surprising number one dashboard distraction here's a list of how the same study ranks some of the most popular in-car systems overall the number one voice oriented dashboard distraction is believe it or not Apple Siri being used for almost anything this will surprise some folks because Siri is a natural conversation tool but that open-endedness along with the range of tasks it can control along with the fact that you might end up drifting off into an inane conversation with her it makes it perhaps a bit too much hope you enjoyed this episode thanks for watching keep the email coming it's on cars at cnet.com and find us on just about any of your favorite streaming platforms like YouTube where you can subscribe to our Channel head to your Roku box and just search see net on cars or go to cnet.com slash to find all the ways you can get c net to go this show and our other content i'm brian coulis i'll see you next time we check the technique you