Gadgetory

I asked the Chevy Impala the favorite vehicle of lowriders grandfather's and rental fleet employees dramatically changed yes that is an Impala let's drive a 2014 - LT and check the tech now this is a part of our video right not only tell you how to spot the car in question that's easy on this one just open your eyes this car looks nothing like that previous dim Paula that dough ball queen of the rental Lot this car has angles and creases kind of a rear haunch sloping forward design a little bit of Camaro a little bit of Malibu and hotness all over it and then a nice job with this vehicle we have what is known in the common American vernacular as fancy unfortunately GM traditionally can't help themselves in confusing luxurious with gaudy so I see a lot of overly polished plaster wood and excessively wide chrome strips all over this thing but that's just how they do it now the star of the show is you probably noticed is this 8-inch Chevy MyLink head unit this is your audio your media whether Pandora your OnStar is now graphically controlled not just in those mirror buttons that still exist up here and the trick that everyone loves is push the button you've seen this on TV probably we don't push it and hold it and the screen goes up and there you have a little secret bin for your mobile device and it can also charge on that USB port which is also a connection for media and when I go to the navigation system you find the first indication of what continues to pop up throughout this rig which is very slow response this unit seems to be overwhelmed by the processing chores it has to do that tells me not enough CPU are not optimized code just trying to zoom out is a push again and again experience if you want to enter a destination you can press that button there oh no thanks I prefer to use the voice command which is actually pretty advanced on this car you're able to tell it an address as the number of the street and the city in one go that's nice and you get good prompts in the center screen and you sometimes get the similar prompts on the main screen so there's a lot of visual support so you know what it wants you to say can get the task done and get back to driving street address say the address in California or say changed state or 235 second Street San Francisco 2 3 5 seconds yes complete your selection from the radio display now here's where it gets long and sluggish for some reason it's transferring from that screen to this screen and taking forever and I was told to wait and look over here and now continue my confirmation of the navigation that's where things start to break down so I hid my address to go there for some reason it took me to the Pacific Ocean I don't know what's going on the audio sources are pretty straightforward nothing goofy everything's solid so you've got lots of USB ports you saw the one up in here right I've got two more down here in the console you can run three USB devices at once other media choices include my streaming Bluetooth phone of course there's am/fm satellite and HD radio on this guy and Pandora works quite seamlessly once your phone is paired boom it just works nice metatags good album art very clear controls they've done a good job on that now let's talk about driver control technology first of all you see our shifter here one choice only six-speed Automatic there is a manual position but not a sport mode but when you get in there you don't have paddles to shift on this car ever you use this little dainty rocker switch on top of the knob I never liked that now we have all the driver assistance tech in this car which includes rear view camera which is optional by the way it should be standard on a car of this level in this price we have a lane departure warning but it won't correct anything we'll check that on the road we have blind spot indications again there's no correction just that little light goes off and we also have forward collision warning which will tell you when you're closing on someone too fast but again won't do anything about it and we also have rear sonar for parking along with that optional camera and that combines also for cross traffic alert to avoid getting t-boned when you're backing out now under the hood the impalas unusual the only car in its class where you can get a four-cylinder two and a half liter direct injection modern motor but you won't find that on Taurus or azerath other competitors we don't have it though we have the big boy right now the v6 this is 3.6 liters direct injection variable valve timing output is 305 horsepower 264 foot-pounds of torque this car weighs 38 hundred pounds or so gets up to 60 in 6.8 seconds they're about so not bad certainly no slow now the mpg is 1828 but an average of just 21 kind of thirsty which brings up an interesting point there will be later in production the availability of a 2.4 liter ecosystem I'll die Brit we've driven that engine before not anything quite this big but it could be an intriguing motor it's actually kind of a nice one and it could take care of the thirstiness here we'll see about that let's go for a ride you said the Impala's v6 engines got gobs of good stuff you put it in manual and sift through the gears but if you leave it to the automatic everything is muted the shifts are relatively buttery they're not urgent and therefore the engine doesn't feel urgent although I think it is the powertrain isn't because of the transmission now the ride quality is excessively smooth and the steering is kind of Numb and over assistant all of this is as you can tell adding up to a lot of the DNA from the old Impala kind of bleeding through General Motors still thinks this cars apparently selling to the same audience it used to sell to which I find a little surprising for all the work they've done on it now out on the open road the lane departure warning system is calibrated a little a little lazily for my taste is the best way to put it it doesn't seem to sound the warning until you're already on or well over the line most of the time on the freeway that to me kind of defeats the purpose the forward collision warning does have the three set of bull levels and it is actually a pretty meaningful tech it seems to do a pretty good job although I'm happy to report I rarely found it doing its job while I was driving which is good and all this car feels like a much more quality piece than the previous Impala which is actually high praise I find the outgoing Impala to be while highly uninspiring and actually a very serviceable very well built car if not much in terms of concepts okay let's price our 2014 Impala this guy's a 2lt it's basically the mid trim level nice but not everything is in there so we start adding on a thousand 95 to get that MyLink head unit with navigation that's a must to go seen that style now as I mentioned you got to also package up if you want a rear camera that makes me grit my teeth but you got to do it that's called the convenience package rear cam rear sonar automatic mirror home link it's a little under a thousand bucks now the steal of the day is there a driver assistance package for only eight hundred and ninety bucks you get the forward collision warning the cross traffic alert the lane departure warning the blind spot warning that's kind of a deal so all in we're somewhere shy of $36,000 nicely equipped but not top of the line how does he empower fair overall this is not a driver's car but it's a nice driving car know what I mean it's not going to appeal to a dramatically different market than the one that left it but it's now a seriously good competitor against the Taurus the 300 the Azera and the Toyota Avalon all of which by their way have been refreshed lately it's a very competitive space but this guy can hold its own you