Gadgetory

huh I recall in the Japanese only made small cars all right let's drive one of their biggest the 2014 Infiniti qx80 all-wheel drive and check the 10 now let's be honest the qx80 is a great big blunderbuss of a thing and its lines make no attempt to hide that I mean look at this face what is this fudgie the whale and it's cut off like a blunt piece of lumber out the back you got this pouty jutting rear bumper nothing about this vehicle makes apologies for its presence as you can see obviously why would you have something this big if you didn't you can also get that second row as a bitch that lifts your passenger capacity in this thing to eight people members of Congress now inside this big boy it's kind of an ersatz luxury I don't think Infiniti on this vehicle does the best job with plaster wood and plastic Rome but it does say fancy we've seen this head unit before and generally liked it when we see it this is your 8 inch touchscreen with pretty good response you see I'm bouncing around the map here pretty easily you've also got the Infinity controller which turns kicks and clicks they got rid of the buttons around it which makes good sense voice command is also available so a lot of ways to run this guy the voice command is actually quite tight check it out please say a command navigational navigation please take address address what state please California California now as you can see it picks up what I say really quickly the downside is when you get into the address you've got to do state city street number as independent little buckets that's kind of old feeling at this point in history but all in all quite functional still a little bit childish looking display good 3d flyby mode and they do a nice job showing you what lane to be in when you get to one of those desi freeway interchanges so not a whole lot new there and I will say this this vehicle has about the best streaming Bluetooth I've heard which is kind of saying something because streaming Bluetooth doesn't sound real good but this one does a great job of bringing it together making good sense of the sound and even bringing out things I don't hear in some other cars that's impressive let's talk about some drive controls you don't have it every vehicle first of all this all-wheel drive controller right here with an automatic mode that you leave it in typically four-wheel high or push and turn to for low you need to know about exactly nothing about off-roading to use this guy our shifter goes to a 7-speed automatic the only choice you have a sip double gate over here that also gives you a little more of a sporty behavior and notice when I go to reverse you find a whole bunch of cameras go up here this can also work for front view as well which will do when you're creeping at low speeds if you hit something in this car you weren't looking in fact you can apply in full done along with those cameras goes a ton of available driver-assistance tap let's run down the list there's adaptive cruise control lane departure warning and prevention distance control alerts independent braking and front collision warning and prevention blind spot warning and intervention backup collision intervention and steerable front headlights you almost can't crash this thing and power stuff galore in this vehicle you got your power liftgate button over here you've got power buttons here to drop the back seat almost violently and there are power switches in the very back to raise and lower the seats in the third row oddly enough though you get this little dinky mail slot of a sunroof and no option to make it bigger this is way behind the times okay under the not insignificant prowl of this thing is a five point six liter v8 direct-injected variable valve timing beyond that though nothing terribly tricky about it's just big 400 horsepower 413 foot-pounds of torque that's enough to get this nearly free tunnel up to 60 in the high six-second range through a 7-speed automatic and all-wheel drive in our configuration as I mentioned you get about 14 20 mpg we're doing about 15 average all in 26 gallon tank at current California prices it's 108 bucks of fill-up let's go find out what it gets us now a lot of things about this qx2 Drive are clearly not a driver's car set of influence I mean from the pedal actuate an emergency brake to the big doughy ride we have the adaptive suspension in this car but it still is a big kind of a wallah we experience much better than I'm sure it would be without it the power is plentiful but you've got kind of a numb accelerator as you'd expect on a vehicle in this category that will modulate out any kind of jerkiness and the power delivery and it's all sort of disconnected from the road the steering gives you almost no feedback on what's going on in other words this car is perfect for the kind of person who is shopping for it you're not buying this and cross shopping it with a Cayenne for crying out loud it's a whole different animal it's kind of in the Escalade class you have no idea what kind of road you're driving on when you're in the qx80 you're just kind of floating above it all once you do get in it though especially if you get over here on the shifting gate you get a nice snarl out of that v8 and a ton of power which is actually kind of amazing that's something that's heavy can ever move that fast so I got a hand that - that's not okay let's price this giant thing starts off about sixty-five five for a qx80 remember that's the v8 and I'm talking about the all-wheel drive model here and that price does include delivering now the options they all basically come in big packages the first one is the rear seat entertainment system which I'm gonna pass on all day it's DVD based if your kids are intrigued by DVD they need tutoring not rear seat entertainment I am intrigued though more by the technology package which includes all the driver assistance technologies an amazing amount of them for 30 to 50 and the last thing I'm on the fence on is this whole package its deluxe touring they call it like 4,600 bucks it gets you the adaptive suspension which I think this vehicle needs also cooled seats a bunch of interior trim upgrades oh and surround sound on your Bose audio system probably worth it but there's an awful lot in there you're looking at about 73 five for one of these guys then I've seen that style not a cheap ride but you're getting a lot of tonnage for your money if that helps and once you're in there you're so isolated from the real world you won't even remember what your payment is