Gadgetory

about the most competitive segment of the US car market these days what they call the midsize sedan Camry Fusion Accord that's also where the Ultima plays the all-new alter but does it play hard enough let's drive this 2013 ultimate SL and check it now as you can see this new Altima is really new they've done a lot to get rid of the kind of rental car do we look it used to have but bear in mind we're driving an SL top-end trim they won't all look this good but it's not just up against the imports you know but the recently revived and very compelling Ford Fusion and Chevy Malibu for example but we're looking here at a very nicely finished cabin with much better materials than in the past Nissan was kind of behind on that compared to the competitors to the head unit this is not the top end you're going to find we don't have navigation here that is available I'll talk about that in a minute but we do have though now is this color display all the sources you really care about are here the dumb ones aren't so this works really well USB for iPod and thumb drive is down there AM and FM is over here with satellite radio next to it no HD radio in this car by the way and of course your optical slot is here auxilary can bring up an aux jack which is right there dying to be snapped off or your bluetooth streaming like I have my phone connected and notice we have some really nice meta tags coming in everything fits on the screen well they've used the Real Estate nicely this is your controller that lets you roll through selections or press ENTER it's a simplified version of the controller you see on the more elaborate head units so we do have Bose sound on this guy it's not terribly fancy there's no fancy DSP in here it's just bass treble balance better speakers better amps I see a center channel up there for example it's overall a very successful interface except in one area the real gripe I have is these guys have the worst case of sub button itis look at this AM and FM or one-button satellite radios another button what we're going to do that why don't you give am/fm and satellite a button CD and aux go together but not all the alternate sources because iPod gets its own button this is silly just give me a source button that's not going to confuse anybody we've been dealing with source knobs on stereo receivers since the late 50 it's not a new concept and it's a much better organizing principle than this sub nonsense this is the only car maker that does it now what I wish we had was what they call the technology package that would upgrade this to a seven inch screen put navigation in there it's not a connected unit per se but it does have Google fed points of interest so your Pio eyes stay fresh and also send to car so you can send from your desktop a destination that you want available when you get there not bad that package also brings in something interesting called moving object detection you would have cameras all around the car which we've seen before on Nissan's the around view but it would also be doing artificial intelligence to detect if there is anyone walking around the car you're about to run into especially in parking garages and things like that now the other screen of this car is this one between the gauges here finally a beautiful helper LCD in an affordable Nissan you can page through that to get tire pressure mpg info some various vehicle alerts your settings for the screen and your lane departure and blind spot indications rear camera of course on a car with a screen very small this is the only place where I find the screens a little bit tight and the camera tends to run a little dim as well no trajectory just some basic distance markings one choice only on the ultimate no matter what model you get you're going to get what they call their xtronic CVT it's a continuously variable transmission you have a drive and a drive Sport position which will change the behavior a bit and of course you have paddles but interestingly look at them they're mounted on the column this is really unusual and I like it to place shifter paddles here on the wheel and fix them supposes that you're going to always keep your hands there who the hell does that okay under the hood it's a Nissan follow along with me 3.5 liter v6 this one sits sidesaddle drives the front wheels only 270 horsepower 251 foot-pounds of torque this car weighs about 3300 but it gets up to 60 in a very nice 5.7 seconds with this bigger engine there's also a two and a half liter for a whole different story and we're getting 22 31 EPA estimates on this car and part of that mpg which is pretty good comes from the fact that this year's CVT has a wider array of ratios it can consensus eyes if you will allowing it to even better keep this engine in the sweet spot now another cool piece of cabin tech on this Nissan barely lives in the cabinets mostly out here see that tire pressure warning says I've got a badly low Left Front so what you do is you start pumping up the tire and this car is going to flash its hazards to acknowledge that you're doing that then when you get to the right pressure it's going to beep once and that's when you stop let's say you go over you keep going you're chatting on your phone or something it's going to now flash the hazard lights faster and you're going to get three beeps it gets really upset so you start to let air out on the valve down here until you get one beep again and you know you're back where you should be kind of foolproof kind of cool now because we have the ultimate v6 we have no lack of power no lack of responsiveness the car has got a very quiet cabin the engine makes a persistent note you hear it all the time I'm also not a real big fan of the ride quality except on the smoothest roads it's a firm suspension that's great but it's annoyingly transmissive I'm getting too many little little potholes that big out over feel those I'll bet they do a recalibrate next year to soften up the ride steering feels great it's not over assistant and a really comfortable cabin they've got a nice job keeping it spacious there's no soldier room not a lot of fall in here on this line on the body to make you feel claustrophobic and these seats really are some of the nicest I've driven in the oil okay pricing a 2013 Altima SL top stack 31 to 90 with destination rolled in there's only one option you've got to get to go seen that style and you will do this because it's a scorching deal that tech package it's only a thousand ninety bucks to get you seven inch navigation with Google POS and send to car you're also going to end up with lane departure warning blind spot warning and the multiple cameras around the car that you object detection it sounds like a typo at that price but it's a nice package on this car