Gadgetory

it's got more horses than India's laps big old treads that they stole parts off a steamroller and the angriest scowl in the auto business Oh God not that get out of here that let's drive the 2012 Camaro zl1 and check the tech now the zl1 is pretty standard Camaro stuff in the cabin if you've seen a Camaro you've seen this nothing changes dramatically you do get some Mouse fur up here on the dash and you get a cluster of gauges that's very complete oil pressure and tempo and your blower pressure coming off the supercharger right in front of those tour sports traction control these are the buttons you used to control the ferocity of the drivetrain which notice though because we have the automatic groan in three two right you don't have launch control only the six-speed manual on this car has launch control for getting out of the hole as cleanly as possible but it kind of doesn't matter because this car is two-tenths of a second faster with the six-speed Automatic no gate on it you go back to drive or you go to manual in manual your paddle impulses stick now this head unit is the head unit you cannot get an LCD traditional navigation head unit in this top-end Camaro some will say who cares that isn't the point of the car others will say it's the top end Camaro give me the choice I think I'm in that camp for the most part your entertainment choices are am/fm satellite radio no HD radio in this guy auxilary Jack CD drive right here or you can stream from your Bluetooth phone as well but you're not going to get any meta tag information just audio playback on here it's pretty rudimentary now of course since you can't see a map there you're thinking what known avital well yes you've got the OnStar directions and connections that's a plan you subscribe to hit the button talk to the operator which is now automated and they'll feed you rudimentary directions on here and on this center display now I just find that using OnStar for navigation is really cumbersome I don't want to talk to the operator shoot me and if I'm talking to the automated system all too often the thing rings and doesn't pick up like four times today alone then you've got a language issue here in California lots of streets have complicated Spanish based names maybe you're in one of the parts of the country with American Indian base names it doesn't get those things well Sepulveda and is a POC WA just can to make it nutty now the last thing to notice about this car if you haven't already is the fact that it's kind of like driving a tank high beltline low roof you got this gun slit you're looking out of aka the windshield and the car feels very tall and square when you're in it as well this all adds up to something kind of disconcerting to me but that's a matter of taste oh thank you chevy for doing the speedometer right so many cars today go to 200 miles an hour on the speedo in a tiny little arc that means you can't tell 50 from 60 it's like a couple needle widths here they spaced out the reasonable speeds see that and then took all the ones you're never going to do and compress them over on the right finally oh one more give back because we don't have a color LCD we don't have a good home for the rear view camera as a result it lives up here on the left side of the mirror filled with Chrome II glare didn't really work for me that way although it does have trajectory prediction which is kind of slick for a little guy like this aside from BMW this may be the best head-up display in manufacturer right now it'll show you any combination of speed GeForce entertainment currently playing next navigational direction a lot of good stuff in there with four different menu pages adjustable height and brightness now herein lies the heart of the beast this is your 6.2 liter supercharged v8 you probably need to know much more than that do you but I'll continue 580 horsepower 556 foot-pounds of torque good grief zero to sixty is a little under 4 seconds though who cares this is more like a zero to 100 car car rocket now you only get 12 18 mpg in this configuration that's pretty poor and you're going to get hit with a gas guzzler tax as a result if you buy this car you don't care rear wheel drive only of course as I mentioned choice of two gearboxes six automatic or six manual and you have a standard magnetic ride control that's an active adaptive suspension in all ZL ones check that out down there that is an electric power steering rack so I'm consider that heresy in a muscle car and by the way this is a sequential port fuel injected motor not a direct injected motor it is relatively low-tech so what do you save on a car with five minute 80 horsepower Trane's this being a huge supercharged 6 plus liter v8 what am I going to tell you I mean it's madness and it's a hell of a lot of fun in kind of an unrefined way I don't mean any disrespect to Chevy but this car feels like I'm very nicely finished sledge here it comes on hard it's big and chunky it's got some road manners though I'm not an expert in driving it in just a couple of days I've had it and overall it's got a gritty factor to it that is exactly what this car sets out to do it's about having fun it's about visceral it's about red-blooded it's about Americana the power is ungodly as you can imagine look I'm on a tight autocross track I can't begin to utilize what this car can do and that's one of the fascinating things about it you can buy a car now for about fifty thousand dollars that does so much more than you could possibly exercise this is a wonderful era for those who love horsepower the ride on this car as you can imagine is firm but it's not the most jarring I've driven it's actually fairly comfortable certainly at speeds like this and it's got one of the great exhaust notes in American driving today okay let's price rzl one should you be so inclined fifty-six three delivered but that also includes a $1300 gas guzzler tax you're going to pay for your fun in this guy now the options to take it further see net style are limited as we talked about sunroof 900 bucks purists are going to say no then we've got another 1100 to get the premium sound with the dual powered subs in case those exhaust tips aren't music enough to your ears the only other option is around 1200 for the automatic transmission I can be convinced on automatics these days but not on this one it's kind of muddy and I really want to drive the me you