Gadgetory

looks like some of you are still confused about what fuel to fill your ID with is the android-powered receiver the best head unit for your android phone and what's the holdup on the development of a certain iOS app we're about to discuss the answer with all those questions and more on cnet roadside assistance this is episode number 47 yes for the first of march 2012 I'm antuan goodwin alongside senior editor wayne cunningham and we got mitchell chang at the controls so let's just kind of jump right into it his first question has actually got me scratching my head a little bit comes in from Cody he says at the end of your most recent show there was a comment made about electrolyzing and burning hydrogen if some questions questions about efficiency aside would such a system allow for the burning of built up gunk without the need to use detergent and or other fuel additives if so would it not be a worthwhile consideration for divisions more concerned with greenhouse numbers than horsepower see the prius 2 volt or Volkswagen as a side note I have stood beside modern 200 plus mile gallon cars weight 200 plus mile per gallon cars because they would not survive wait I think he's just saying that the whole toted mile per gallon cars things most of the theories they wouldn't work in his local winner in Canada where things get very cold any 50 wouldn't know so they wouldn't be able to up a hill yeah so he says the biggest concern for some of these vehicles is the way the driver is an extra 10 pounds I can change the efficiency and as we all know yeah I get fatter every year yeah they even the 40 mile per gallon cars if you load them up with you know about 45 people you might because that's it that's almost the weight of the car right there right or half the weight of the car anyway it's a lot of stuff as so last week we talked a little bit about about one of these systems where and you find these mentioned online and some people spam email you with them saying that you can add a hydrant electrolyzer to your car so you fill up a water tank use the current from the cars generator to electrolyze the hydrogen funnel that hydrogen into the fuel system and you'll get better mileage I don't think the math he works there but Cody here is saying that went this work to clean up the gunk that gets you builds up in your engine carbon buildup stuff like that whether would it were not I don't think it's the most I don't think it's a it's the it's really a little complex it's you know like flooding spies with a I don't know a shotgun yeah so it was like they're simpler ways to get rid of the conch is what you're saying yeah for example I guess a Shell Oil their shell gasoline they've got some nitrogen enriched gasoline that they doubt supposed to clean up your car better and in fact all gasolines have detergents in them and I don't think that seems like an easier solution than adding this whole apparatus to your car right it's kind of funny though because the fedora technology that you said it's kind of see in the those last eight pages of like a car magazine on those like just pages of pages of dumb ads for things like weather mats for your car and it's just like something dumb like an electric supercharger I remember when I was a when I was first starting to get into modifying cars I'd see all these ads for like electric turbos and it's just you know the common knowledge was you stay away from those things because someone just bought like a bilge pump or something and they basically bolted up your car and doesn't do anything would actually impede the flow of air yeah but then like you know now we start seeing that automakers are starting to take things like that seriously electric superchargers are possibly a thing that someone's developing hydrogen electrolysis is that sort of sort of same thing for me it's just like oh yeah sure so you just add this thing to your car right squirt some water into your intake and all of a sudden everything's better you've got you know XP like 10 miles per gallon as a result of this but I mean there is some science behind it i think that's interesting well there certainly is and i would hope that the engineers the scientists at the car companies that are looking for every way of making their cars more efficient have considered this at least and if they have you know hopefully they've done the math and said will this actually work i mean if it was a silver bullet i would assume they would implement yeah they do it I mean who wouldn't want to like be first to market with that yeah but I think what's interesting is that the the the actual science is way more complicated often than the thing you find the back eight or magazine Valley you know this sort of like yeah water injection system machine the magazine is just like a fish tank pump and a nozzle that eres tu no eres Eliza's the water oh yeah now you've got hydrogen right because hydrogen's and water two molecules in there right um but then the actual science is a lot more complicated and then probably a little bit beyond my journalist pine yeah well and as long as yeah cleaning out your card to you know not only would you have to add the system to your card or the carmaker would have to add the system to the car you'd also have to along with filling up the gas fill up your water tank right frequently to make sure there's enough hydrogen file into the system the to you to make the system work so do you really want to fill up an extra tank short answer to your question Cody no yes not yet at the very least they're definitely easier ways to go about doing it so let's move on to the next question this comes in from cash and banting t'en illinois says hi guys is one to know your opinion on a topic doesn't focus on car tech so very much it says do you think that people should use anything other than 87 octane fuel in a modern car my opinion is that a TI 87 octane is just fine for v6 or smaller engine and that higher octane zar good for v8 with the way modern car engines are made this day and age do you think you get any better performance or a better miles per gallon using different grades of octane i just bought a 2012 v6 dodge challenger by the way and he also tells us keep the great car tech coverage first of all i think your scales a little off yeah you're basically wrong there and see assuming the number of cylinders has anything to do with the octane yeah it's nothing to do with displacement everything to do with compression ratios what happens is the higher octane fuel has what are called knock additives in it and basically they keep the fuel from pre detonating under high compression so what happens is as you compress anything gets hotter so if you have an engine with like a really high like 11 to 1 compression ratio there's a chance that cheap fuel will actually detonate before it reaches full compression and that's when you run into knock and in a vehicle without a knock sensor or some sort of the ability to adjust its timing you run into issues where you can potentially damage the engine so like a turbocharged engine that has like a lot of the crims a lot of air into the cylinder or modern day like engines that have really high compression ratios I can't think of any off top of the hit but they get up to 11 almost 12 to 1 compression ratios most cars sit around what 10 or 9 yeah yeah I don't remember but yeah when you have cars that have really high compression ratios that's where the the higher octane fuel comes into into to play the thing is a lot of big dumb v8 and don't really have high compression ratios because they don't need it they're big dumb v8 so pouring like they're really expensive fuel into like a six or seven year old v8 engine is completely wasting your money yeah and even though say the v6 Dodge has that that's got the 3.5 let's ride 3.5 liter v6 is that the kind of scene 2 story and I nuin yeah then the new pentastar engine and that's not a particularly high compression engine that's a standard compression right my rule of thumb is that if you open the the fuel tank and there's a thing that says use premium gas you use the premium gas I don't think many automakers will tell you to use more expensive gas if you didn't need it the thing is cars are smart enough that if you put in cheaper gas it'll figure it out but you'll cost yourself a little efficiency in doing so because the system will have to run inefficiently it'll probably retarded timing yeah or whatever it has to do to keep itself from damaging itself on the cheaper fuel yeah but so I would say there there's sometimes if you just I mean you're not going to save more than like 30 cents on a fill-up by know about a buck on a fill-up maybe by stepping down to the cheap fuel but if your car doesn't require the expensive fuel then you basically are wasting a buck by stepping up to the more expensive right now the kind of cars that general I do require the higher octane fuel are well we just talked about a Ferrari in our previous show which probably has very high compression so you probably pretty much one of these racing fuel in that one and cars that generally sport car type of things with their really generating a lot of horsepower out of smaller displacement for example or just trying to get a ton of horsepower out of those vehicles and you know then you know that that's generally when you have higher compression and you want that better octane fuel I think something like the M but you know if you look at like you know the modern Corvette for example I don't think that's particularly high compression v8 die don't think the modern Corvette even s for premium q yeah yeah I don't think it does either it's a big v8 yeah they're getting away a lot of displacement like what 20 liters or something but yeah it's like it's a big engine but it's like a big pushrod engine the technology and that's really old yeah so it's like they're kind of getting away with like using the the old-school formula just like Oh we'll just add more displacement don't more fuel into it and that'll make it more powerful yeah as opposed to shrinking the engine down or adding turbocharging or basically that I think the tolerance is on on extremely high compression engines are kind of are a bit more precise than you would on like a big engine with a little compression so it's more expensive to kind of build that into cars and so I think automakers are kind of just starting to come around to it but even even then a lot of those engines a lot of those engines still don't ask for the premium fuel I think this is a Hundert one of the Hyundai's has a pretty high compression on on the veloster turbo doesn't ask for premium does it ah that was literally is Genesis right it was just turbo I don't know if the Genesis turbo s for premium if not they definitely have two different ratings for premium and for cheap fuel to give you the option yeah I think yeah with Hyundai and keep trying to sell a lower price car they're probably not really going to try to make you buy premium gas cuz that's going to go against the whole theme of the car but you look at something like a Porsche where they're you know 3.8 liters and they're getting massive you know 400 horsepower out of then certainly you're going to want to use high octane in that the Genesis gives two different so it can run on cheap fuel yeah but then it can also run on premium and if you're buying a Porsche then by the just getting the expensive fuel is basically another way to show that you're richer than everyone else at a gas station go ahead and pick up that gold pump actually have someone else do it for you pay someone else to pump for you are in a Porsche no self service so I guess that's we've spent enough time on that question I really hope that into the answered it what else if we got here Keith actually wrote us about the eye on road app that you reviewed recently and or was it so recently it was late last year not too long ago wait last year yeah and so this is keith is complaining that iron Road that should be there they're working on it for the iphone that they only had over the android when you reviewed it there was a side there's a sign-up sheet on the on their website that says like sign up to know when the iphone version comes out but Keith goes on a rant saying talking about the the the iphone version of it says it has been in development according to the website for at least several months now it seems definitely for at least the last four to six months it can't be that difficult converting the software code from android to apple can it if it's not by all means keith do it you'll get the iOS version of vion road as soon as we get our android version of instagram they're very different like software you know conversion isn't really what you'd call easy they're also probably a couple of things that they're having to deal with i mean the iphone i always does let you do multitasking but it's not exactly the same kind of multitasking as you would have on the android so doing something like running this app in the background is probably proving tricky to the developers but there are I think there are other apps that will do a similar thing if you don't like I on road I think there's a drive may tap drive matric i think i'm going to talked about it before but i think they're full version has some sort of a recorder that'll let you like see what's going on with a vehicle in front of you here we go is this it and so this is an iphone app that will I thought running on a JVC receiver and if drive mate safety cam yeah this gives you a warning if you're about to hit somebody right so if you can't wait for I on road drive mate safety Kam drive mate one word safety Kam one word available in the iTunes Store does the same thing it watches the road ahead of you for vehicles it lets you know how much distance you have between you and them and it gives you a warning if you get too close it also has this very weird looking tron like interface I'm gonna drop the link in the show notes right now because it just popped into my head I've dropped it into the wrong field now we have a another question now this is a sweet answer that one this next question is from Chicago engineer so he signs himself so I think engineers are the kind of people that want to know what car technology he says I have a 2000 for is 300 Lexus and I'd like to I'd like to be upgrading my stock radio system i have a droid x and aidan asus transformer one that I can't live without and would like my car to be my third Android device here are the few apps I would like my stereo to run pandora google map internet radio apps dog catcher etc i'm considering the parrot asteroid or a prey do to pending a review are there anything else available aside from these two units anything upcoming this year anything like tomtom our garmin that had pandora like apps well here's the thing for f radio to first of all it's not powered by android it just lets you use the the what is the mirror link sort of functionality that you can get on an android device and the asteroid is crap i've learned that over the last couple of weeks since i've done that review and i'm actually thinking about going back and updating it I've its skill in the aveo I still had it in there and I've had to deal with it for a number of weeks at least any week that I wasn't reviewing a regular car and if you've already got a perfectly good smartphone it doesn't do anything that your phone doesn't already do all you really need is a cradle in a bluetooth stereo and you're fine the screen smaller than the one on your android device the google map sucks it doesn't really have any sort of like streaming apps outside of the the one that it has on there but I mean the ones that are on your phone do exactly the same thing I would say don't even bother trying to find an android-powered car stereo if you love your droid x and you've got all these apps that you already really love to use just use your phone so find yourself a bluetooth a car stereo that supports bluetooth a2dp for about 150 bucks save the x 4 250 bucks you would have spent on the Pandora and the parrot asteroid or even on the App radio too if you don't really need a gigantic screen and do something else with it yeah i would suggest as far as this car goes along with the new head unit that has the bluetooth a2dp is get a good clip for the phone something may be mounted on the dash yeah so you can easily slide your phone you jump in the car you slide your phone in that that clip the cradle and you know you're ready to go yeah so these because he goes on and he starts talking about things like because the the asteroid requires that you you know plug in a 3g dongle or something that you know you get like a clear 4g and leave it in your car you can't tether the phone i tried it every other ways though the weather though the connection this in your phone is useless at that point so now you're dealing with like a completely separate data plan you don't want to deal with any of that just find yourself a nice single din bluetooth-enabled car stereo something and maybe Sony or pioneers lineup alkali and I don't think a lot of their models have Bluetooth built into it just yet but have to double check that but and then just save the money suction cup your phone to your dashboard if that's what you got to do and just you'll be way happier than you will be struggling with the the asteroid and I mean I haven't tested the app radio 2 yet so I can't really speak on that all right Matt actually writes us about he says he's got the recently purchased a 2010 jeep wrangler sahara with the infinity sound system he's wanting to upgrade to something that will offer better i phone connectivity so this must mean the head unit not so much the the speakers are anything he's not really interested in added connectivity with the phone although it would be nice bonus more more concerned with playing music and charging the phone like to keep the cost under three hundred dollars what do we can we suggest that will not require too many modifications 300 bucks the first thing that pops into my head is that you don't really care about anything else charging the phone playing music you don't particularly care about you know making phone calls um-hmm where I go alpine alpha an ITA x 305 it doesn't have a CD player I don't know if you have CDs laying around you'd lose your CD player in that case but then there's also the Sony tune Trey units that are also really good again mech free so you don't have a CD player I don't know if he needs a CD player well I'm looking at a photo of the Jeep here and it's got a standard doubled in the spot every hundred book price point means you're not getting a screen so you're sticking with a single din unit right so you need a single din and one of those adapter brackets that gives you a little pocket or something underneath yeah it'll be like 50 bucks yeah for the less than that even I think I've seen that the market and that's fallen out so much I think you can get like a car kit for like what 25 bucks now the wire harness is like seven you do it yourself right so sprinkler it can't be that hard yeah search around Crutchfield there there's so many options that you could get to get a good yeah I phone connectivity I mean that's that's pretty much standard these days with the aftermarket head units yeah i mean i would say find something that if you if you go in one of the sony units there any x line that has Bluetooth built into it you get iphone connectivity you get bluetooth so you'll be able to make calls even if you don't want to you never know like I you make it like a like a new girlfriend she might like to talk on the phone all the time and you just put her on speakerphone and hit mute tues what I would also suggest to is get the bluetooth audio streaming system because again it's not going to run you more than 300 bucks alright and what you'll find is what I found is driving a lot of cars is sure I can hook my iphone up to a cable in the car and get all that Connor or the control via the head unit which is nice but it's just so much easier after a while you could just kind of get over it you just want to jump in the car you got some music already you know have your iphone playing random or whatever and if the bluetooth streaming is all up bluetooth audio streaming you jump in and the music's playing already and you're listening to all your favorite music anyway that's already on the phone well you don't get to like play with the knobs yeah so you'd have to actually touch your phone if you decided this music sucks and I want a completely different playlist you have to actually touch your phone but the advantage to getting to making sure that you have bluetooth streaming built-in is that you know next year when the iphone five comes out and they switch over from the 30-pin dock connector or something it was like one reared rumor that are going to dish the 30-pin dock connector we just switch over bluetooth in just now you know you're using bluetooth with a few decide to jump to android or windows mobile or blackberry yeah you can still do that anybody who gets into your car can just pay her up and start listening so you have an option even though you don't necessarily need it and I'm pretty sure when cost you any more than like an extra 20 bucks on top of one that didn't have it so quick lightning round here what brand would you go with Sony Alpine uh I would probably go for under the 300 buck price point I like the sony i like their tune tray units mmm and i also like they're there emmy xbt units but again it would really depend on whether you wanted a CD player and not which one of those you go with yeah i think i've got the iphone your play music off of it you don't really want a CD player anymore nope but it's always nice to have yeah and you got one more email that i was kind of more of a overcorrection than a question it says i was listening to your latest roadside assistance and heard you mention a listener who thought his foreign he thought he had a sport transmission reprogrammed he said he checked the Ford website and saw that it was listed there or something to that effect and you theorized that it was a sink upgrade and he was on the sink my ride website what he's actually talking about is the Ford owner section of their website that lists all of the dealer performed service to a car based on the car's vin number linked to an account the owners can create his 2008 mercury milan is the same way a choice by the way and anytime you take it to the dealer they enter the service info even if it's just an oil change you can view it online it's like a mini carfax format that allows you to manually enter any service if you go away from the dealer and he also talks about that service letting you scheduled maintenance based on mileage federate federer you just wanted to make sure that we weren't confusing that with a sink my red website right I didn't even know that with her that's a cool feature actually and nice to see and this is something we don't certainly when we're reviewing cars it's not an issue we look often have cause to look into or deal with but yeah I mean and I'm sure other companies are on to this that because partly if you have your car registered with dealer and every service update they do or upgrade they do goes on to this website then they can have these appointments and say like hey just bring your car in get some pate of some more money is time for the study found on the real changes exactly and it is a way the dealer's used to maintain or you know keep customers right but I mean it also i'm sure it helps the resale value of the car if you laid it's basically the electronic equivalent of that notebook my dad told me to keep in the glove compartment of every car yeah that i've owned where it's just like if you change the oil your write it in the book it's always everything's written in the book and then when you go to sell the vehicle you can say like oh yeah i've done all these things right you have a logbook right there yeah or the bundle of receipts every oil change receipt on yes yeah but there's the electronic version of that so if you've ever decided to fill your oh wait mercury milan sapersteins popping into my head you can go like oh here's the vin number go and you can see that it's had every scheduled you know maintenance and and an update that it's supposed to have yeah I like that I like that they actually are keeping this online keep it in the cloud sort of thing where yeah you have all your maintance records up there great british or other automakers do it you just yes something that we ever look at yeah i don't see why they wouldn't that's it for this week's emails if you've got a question a comment or if you just want 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