Gadgetory

war back from the consumer electronics show in las vegas and we saw more car stuff than ever before we've got we're going to talk about some stuff we saw from qnx mercedes-benz Audi pioneer and will even take a drive in the Fisker Karma this is car tech live for january 19 2012 I'm Wayne Cunningham in the studio with antuan goodwin and steven Beecham at the controls Brian Cooley is off doing something else right now but he should be back next week I imagine so let's get into it we saw we're consumer electronic show last week which is why we didn't have a car tech live show and there we saw while Antoine you saw something really cool that you gave it you gave the best of CES for car tech not overall the best of CES her car tech reward and that was a excuse me qnx is a car to a mobile applications platform and basically the reason i picked it is because it was a lot of small things that added up to us one really awesome impression of what QX is kind of working on in the car I mean for starters well they basically took their sort of qnx interface that you've already kind of seen in the blackberry playbook and they put that in the dashboard when they put in intelligent so that you know if you're you're driving alone you can't play Angry Birds from the front seat but then you can do things like stream pandora radio or access any of those apps that would run on that that that sort of platform they also replace the entire instrument cluster with like a giant LCD that you know kind of did interesting things like show a very grand turismo like live view of the Nurburgring if you were if you if you're driving on that track and allowed you to kind of switch between like a track mode in a regular driving mode but then I started getting into the the things that really impressed me things that were kind of unique in the QNX booth for starters they basically showed off a way to pair your bluetooth phone with the car without having to go through all the trouble of like pairing and going into in use on your phone and then on your in your car that a you and I way we kind of pair our phones to at least two cars a week yeah and it varies from being extremely easy to extremely maddening Oh what qnx done has done is they've built some NFC technology into their car like so inside of the center console and also in the little cup you know the little pocket that fits underneath the the center stack they've added NFC sensors that can read an NFC chip in the phone automate the bluetooth pairing process nice that would be really really convenient right so you just get in the car you sit your car in the cup holder boom you're paired just like that yeah ended I mean ever like that would save I mean me definitely a ton of time so just for our readers here who probably not you know filled in on this whole insider baseball bit of car technology qnx is a software company that does they do back-end platform work their software appears in a lot of car infotainment systems right but he's but you don't really see their branding or anything like that and so covering this we're seeing what they're doing shows some of the stuff that may come up in cars in the immediate future or the near future so Antoine what features there do you expect to see in cars coming up sometime soon well definitely that sort of internet connection they demoed a rear seat entertainment system that had applications audio and video streaming and I was also even able to do a video conference with some of the guys who are hiding in the back of the booth on their own camera they also showed off that that NFC that technology is already here in phones now it's just a smart application of that technology to basically use that tag that's already in the back of your Galaxy Nexus for example to automate that bluetooth pairing one thing that I want to see but I don't know if we're going to see it anytime soon as they showed off what's called ultra HD audio straw basically in bit it's called ultra HD audio and basically what that allows you to do is do stereo quality CD quality voice calls so you know basically you never into that sort of like muddy voice duplex issue with talking to people I don't know why you'd want it in stereo but they basically stated that will you know if they ever decided to maybe use this sort of same protocol for audio streaming you would need to reinvent the wheel hmm so if you were doing some sort of audio telephony or you know concert broadcast or whatever you can use that same Ultra HD audio technology that you're using for the voice calls already and then you basically would it would be backwards compatible and phones that could do that what I'm think it would be cool is surround sound for your phone calls so you hear you're the person you're talking to you from all around your head ya know it's like that would be weird because whenever I speakerphone with people I tend to like walk around the room and do other things oh I can just imagine me virtually just kind of floating around their head all they drive and you know it's like they're behind you said Larry they say and then suddenly cuz whenever you're on speakerphone the in and you seem a little distracted the first thing the person ask you like what are you doing like oh you know dusting or making a pizza yeah I me a little off script here we talked about or you you saw this Garmin set up at the garmin OEM setup they wouldn't let you take photos up they would not let me take photos of it they have this they showed off three different levels of their sort of like well i guess because the pnd market shrinking you know it's more important than ever for garmin to kind of basically i mean they they know this but they need to let investors and consumers know that the pnd market is only like a chunk of what they do they also have avionics they also do a lot of OEM integration they've already started with a Chrysler in their UConnect system and they want to get more into those sort of things and so they showed off firstly like a very simple dashboard that kind of had some Gracenote stuff built into it things that we that if you've seen the Chrysler you connect system you'll already be pretty familiar with then they showed off a second tier that kind of had this really cool haptic feedback rotary controller with some there's a very interesting dashboard interface I'm actually putting a video up on that today so you check for that on the car tech blog so you can see that in action and then they showed off a top-tier sort of entire garmin dashboard now this thing had an instrument cluster that had been replaced by gigantic LCD a 12 inch LCD display that's in the center stack so all of your climate controls all of your infotainment all of that is just kind of all brought into this touchscreen infotainment sort of system that if you're familiar with the the windows Metro UI from windows phones you kind of have an idea of what that looks like black background white text just really slick and well-designed and they're basically bringing in your navigation they're bringing in the internet they're bringing in your contacts your calendar so you get in your car and and you kind of have this little india thing that pops up and it goes like hey Wayne um so here are the things that you're doing today you've got you know here are your appointment you can click on any of them to navigate to it and it's just kind of that promise of you know your your car basically being intelligent tied into your cloud right I can see it's like I don't really want to go to that meeting but it's gonna take me to that meeting anyway yeah but I was just really sad they wouldn't let me take pictures of it I could take pictures of it so you could see what was going on but they would only let me show blanked out screens with giant garmin logos and right now this is something they're going to show to their potential customers clients yo companies i guess i was actually back there with with them and and in their private their private booths that you can't get into without an invitation and they basically had a bunch of investors who would probably prefer to remain nameless alright see that that's what you get from us is special access one thing i saw which doesn't require any special access at this is really interesting in the north well some north or south north hall north is where the all the automotive stuff is and this year there were some really major displays from companies like mercedes-benz audi ford and we're talking like car show quality displays yeah i think Audi's booth look better than their regular cars like I'm thinking they're gonna start carrying that one around they might you know it was smaller and they had fewer cars and had more lights yeah plenty of water fluorescent lights per square and anywhere else in the it was a well-lit booth I can definitely say that and one thing funny I found about the automotive booth at CES is that from the major auto companies as they had probably more dashboards than cars around which is perfect for conserve electronics show floating dashboards which seats in front of them right and one thing that they had in the mercedes-benz booth where they actually had the new SL roadster which they also just unveiled to Detroit the same week this car they had its dashboard in this car is the first one with their new app strategy and I'm kind of excited about this because mercedes-benz was a little bit slow in the whole app integration area BMW already sort of has a strategy audi has already got a strategy but so waiting to see what mercedes-benz did and they showed off this really pretty cool system built in built into their current command interface race yes if I'm if we're perfectly honest is probably the ugliest of the infotainment systems available is still that weird yellowy beige yeah it's special one in green system looks like index cards or something horrible yeah their cars have gotten so futuristic looking yeah the design of that it's you know they had it forever and fortunately it's well so that they added that thing and and this is the fortunate thing I was talking to their the guy demoing it there for me and he mentioned that they are going to upgrade this their idea is to use one of the concept ones that they've had in a yeah you one of the concept interfaces they've shown and the one they'd show it is all sort of it was crazy violet stuff going on which may be a little too much for mercedes-benz buyers but kinda had this weird like Tron look with that the one that you saw with the it's like a black background like violet neon exactly on everything yeah yeah so they said you know he said they're gonna go to something like that need to go they need to find a happy medium right they actually just need to look at how t system that's an idea but the cool oh so anyway their app strategy and this whole new interface they have has this element this is actually going to be deployed in the new SL which is coming out soon this year they've got this covered lo kind of idea so you have these index let's sort of floating into index cards on a carousel with the different apps and you have things like Facebook and Yelp and Google search and you can kind of flow through these little index cards and get to see these different cards and then you find the one you want you select it and then you get into something like oh say you up for example and you can find close nearby places and pick a a review you can find a review of nearby restaurants I think I think it's just focused on restaurants in this first iteration of it they'll block out all the other businesses and stuff you know you really don't need and basically see like the star review and you can navigate to them and whatnot it's really good for like discovering like a new place to eat when you're in the new town yes is any usually the first thing you do is bust out your phone and just go like all right what's around and yeah you know if being able to do this in the dashboard of your car it's why you're parked presumably write a lot lot of the stuff is actually locked out when you're when you're the cars in motion one of the things that I really like to see and I'm seeing this actually a lot more and it probably just kind of piggybacking on Facebook opening up there sort of a API but I'm seeing a lot of Facebook integration in cars with the event because this is something that I've always thought you know a lot of times you can invite it to something somebody you know party or a movie opening or something and then the facebook event kind of has that really nice big map built into it and in a dress when you see it on the website then you've got to copy that down you know beam it to your phone or you know re-input it when you get in the car this is sort of an interesting you know because I guess when you start saying like and they have facebook integration in the car the first thing people go is like what the hell would you want to do that well the mean there's already the sort of rich community of people inviting people to things on Facebook and just being able to take advantage that information get in your car and go like all right I'm going to you know Wayne housewarming or whatever and just being able to go like to do there's the event OOP now I'm going right just have that go to your navigation system the car knows where it is you don't have to copy through your phone and you never have to know your friend's address that way I don't know anyone anyway and they also actually with the Facebook integration in this new mercedes-benz thing you can't update your status but if you're driving they only have these canned responses so it says one of them is I'm currently out and about in the car out and about yeah you can change those okay yeah I was told that you can kind of go in and change those uh when you're not driving and then you know so you would have to is currently out about the car I'm girly mucking about in my car yeah i mean i don't know it's that I don't know that my brain immediately goes to those weird many voices and the quirky things that they said how he was just like I'm having fun motoring guys like imagine you would like goggles none of the driving gloves that sort of thing yeah they said that this this demo that they show it at CES of this mercedes-benz app system it's still a lot they're still doing a lot of work on it and I know they said for one thing it says the first screen said something like mercedes-benz command online and they said no go ahead yeah they're going to change it to mercedes-benz apps I saw some interesting things that their press conference though as far as the future of what they want to do they start they showed off sort of a minority report esque sort of like touch oh yeah anything so they show this video and there's a guy and he's in a car a Mercedes vehicle he's driving around on the embarcadero of San Francisco and this dude has everything on the screen he's got wikipedia articles about a bridge he's like clicking that he's uma ng into his friends and looking at a calendar and I'm sitting here at the press conference going like who the hell is driving this car then it turns out that it's autonomous Oh God and they're sort of you know thinking about building some of that and then it turns out that it's just the kiosk that's in their booth to demonstrate this sort of system but they showed off some other interesting things they had this uh this sort of this sort of car sharing system that they kind of wanted to build in and they showed a video of like you know you're driving along to a concert and some other person wants to go to the concert and they can just kind of ping you and you pick them up in your mercedes-benz and then you go to the concert and have a beautiful friendship after that it was sort of interesting one of the big comments that we get from the livestream commenters is just like they was gonna buy a Mercedes Benz and then start sharing it with people um pick it up hitchhikers yeah I mean I think it's kind of interesting the whole concept of like the cars a social network and you know I always thought that it was kind of cool that they you know early thinking they will you maybe you can make friends with picking up people because I've I've made a friend out of the casual carpool that we have here in the Bay Area it wasn't a lasting friendship but it was a very brief friendship well the funny thing is you never know how certain things will take off and the idea of car is the center of a social network it might be the wave of the future maybe mercedes-benz is on to something you know sometimes things you know just skyrocket like you know cat memes on the internet you know there's there's also do you know kind of the spin-out outsider mercedes banz it into another automaker on star showed off that they open their application platform basically giving apps selected ab providers access to their telematics system so they demonstrated a system with a car sharing service whose name escapes me right now um what's that car sharing service called Oh RelayRides really they basically announced the partnership with RelayRides where if you have an OnStar vehicle and your RelayRides member then people can when they rent your car which basically it's like a private VIP car I have a Chevy Volt I'm not driving it three days out of the week somebody come by pick up my car I Drive it for five dollars an hour all right so you know basically they open up their ass platform to basically allow RelayRides members to show up pop and lock my doors so you don't have to leave the keys underneath a rock or something like that and then also you know allow you to keep track of your vehicle through on starz telematics system so you don't have the issue with the exotic car sharing company where people just show up and steal your damn car yeah it's interesting with the OnStar integration with that I mean on star has the perfect platform to enable that so it makes sense that they would get into it whether RelayRides will actually take off I kind of wonder about it relayrides do what was doing okay before they announced the partnership with GM last year and this is just like another step in that direction but I mean you can rent any car through them yeah so you also saw TeleNav as a whole new thing scout yes just let that telling have already kind of had a nap till enough navigator um but it's you know TeleNav navigator it was good I was a pretty cool name so they renamed well they basically repackaged it as Scout but they did a little bit more than that they've also kind of opened it up into into a little bit more so the app the iphone app it's a visual refresh you get your navigation turn-by-turn directions with voice prompts you get I you destination discovery so you can search for places you can see Yelp reviews you can find places that your facebook friends recommended you can recommend places to your Facebook friends all through the app then there's also a mobile website access Scout ami which basically is a similar sort of functionality but it's on your little your laptop's you're probably going to be a little bit you know more eager to click around and do more it's more sort of focused on discovery at that point because I'm very seriously doubt anyone's walking around with their macbook in one arm you're going from point to point that's seen it but the most interesting thing about Scout that that kind of got my attention is that they've also you know announced a partnership with Ford SYNC AppLink and forwards actually chosen Scout as their mobile navigation app for future appling vehicles so like if you have the Fiesta and you want turn-by-turn directions and you don't want to pay for Ford's turn my job can you even get nav on a fiesta you can uh the theist good question I think I think they're stuck with the same thing destination just yet amber that's whatever destination campus yeah sort of thing but now you'll be able to like hook Scout into that and you'll be able to basically suction cup your phone to the dashboard by turn directions there and and access the controls through the sync system with voice command now let's go they also built hooks into Scout that allow to do video output so even if you don't have a Ford SYNC vehicle you can like if the first partner in this is Sony you'll be able to plug your iPhone in this case they're also android and blackberry versions of the app coming up to that head unit and basically the interface will reformat it felf and display on the touch screen of the Sony so basically you're adding navigation to a non navigation enabled doubled in unit and there are potentials for them to have partnership with OEMs with other aftermarket developers they had a custom ford explorer that was kind of running at the show where they basically taken over the touchscreen display in the dashboard and and replaced the whole Ford you know MyFord Touch system with Scout conceivably you'll be able to do that with with other vehicles as more partners or an out so when does a scout come out it's out now on iphone you know in certain play around with it all right have to update my iphone app I've got until it have on there it's a separate download okay you can actually have telenav inch count running mad by side and with I know with the current telling a bap they or you know last year tell until in that app it was free and get turn-by-turn directions with it but if you want you could pay more and you like traffic and other oh there it's they haven't really discussed pricing with me as far as this but I'm pretty sure it'll be something similar there will be like premium services but I think the basic turn-by-turn directions for you know I'm just trying to get from point A to point B and I just want someone to say turn left here turn right here I that that should be built into the free app cool cool one what I saw in the audi booth its consumer electronics show this was pretty interesting they say and out he's done a lot with technology in the cars we actually voted the audi a7 as our tech car of the year last year just because it had so much going on is the first real real connected car and you know used Google Earth as its navigation system so you know the a7 is well just below the a8 which is outies flagship sedan while their top sedan and then they also put this technology in the a6 and you kind of think okay are they just going to reserve this technology for the premium cars they six through eight but no at the Consumer Electronic Show Audi showed off their new a3 their cheapest car in the US the smallest car in the u.s. well I guess the TT is technically the smallest car in the US right but the a3 is sort of the you know the Affordable Audi in the u.s. they showed off the new infotainment package for that and it has everything that the a6 a7 a8 have and a bit more there you go that's awesome so what's what's new what's new is ok first off in the those other cars they had that cool touch pad thing that let you scribe letters in or select things on the map right in this case they they integrated that touch pad with the controller knob but it's not like a separate skwerkel right it's just built into the top surface of the knobs yeah it's the top of this knob so you can actually scribe on that and then it so the not the dial or knob is a little bit bigger because of that well space is a premium in a smaller car exactly and I think that's why they did this and also cool is the fact they've got the the LCD now it rises up out of the top of the dash and they use this le used an LED LCD so LED backlighting for this LCD is it like as thin as the tvs that we basically also recommended like best to see yeah they said it's actually just a little bit thicker than an iphone oh really yeah so then a nice super narrow lce slides it from the dash and it shows you the google earth and all the kind of stuff that they have in the other cars not a touchscreen doma guessing I'm guessing that not know and thatthat's you know plastic for European cars is they use an indirect control method I'm just like waiting on someone to start jabbing that with a finger snap it off yeah that would be probably Portuguese far aways and kind of hard to reach the but it's just so nice that out he's actually going to bring this stuff into a cheaper car right and it's kind of basically it's interesting because I think a lot of of a small car people buy cars because they're small now not necessarily but will people buy small cars because they're small not necessarily because they're cheap so it's good to sort of see the top-tier functionality in the small car so you're not just kind of like stuck going like a lot of one of a big boat of a vehicle because I live in a city but at the same time I don't want to cheap out on my driving experience right you can still get that that that technology in this car now one of our one of your the runners-up we sought it for the best of CES was the pioneer AppRadio a pretty 02 twice tell me about that well it's so last year they came out with the app radio just after CES so it wasn't really even a contender and last year's show but so basically it's there I like to call it a dumb display they don't like me to call it that but basically what it is is it's a head unit doesn't have anything in it but a screen and a connection for a smartphone and the first gen unit it was just the iphone the second generation AppRadio to ads android connectivity to the bag of tricks it also gets a bigger screen full seven inches so it's a lot more a little bit more sort of display space there but it's interesting to me how they're connecting to the android phone i initially assumed that when they added the functionality to android they'd be using bluetooth because that's pretty much how everything works iphone connect through their dock connector android connects through bluetooth but what pioneers done presumably because they they need to stream live graphic through this connection is that they've required that you use a physical connection for your display so they're basically requiring this you either have a phone that has micro HDMI or they believe it's called a MLT connection hmm and so if you don't have those connections you won't be able actually the MHL mobile high-definition link I don't know what MLT is that in my head but if you don't have those connections if you have a phone that doesn't have a video output you won't be able to use it with a prey do so if you're still holding on to your first gen droid one you can kind of forget about it right this raises the question of do you buy a phone to go with your car or stereo or vice versa you know this is kind of a thing that I find myself talking about all the time on Android Atlas where it's just well all right now you said you've got android support but now you're only supporting a handful phones you know it's this doesn't really make anything easier I think for a ton of Android users but it's interesting to see that there at least doing something here another thing that pioneers doing that I thought was really cool is a they've taken the whole sort of app radio interface and divorced it from the device so now they can add this to their navigation and DVD receivers nope so if you were holding out on an appt radio because you just have a ton of DVDs that you just want to list like watching your call or CDs physical media you're stuck on that their new generation of navigation receivers and DVD audio video receivers also have what's called an advanced app mode so you plug your iPhone up to those and it basically becomes an appt radio when you need it physical media got to get over that you don't still have that big book of 250 CDs all right underneath their paths intersect we need to be stolen sorting through them going like oh one else in today page five you now there's another trend that made itself apparent at CES and this is more in the aftermarket stereo market is mini amps right and so a little background on this those sort of like premium audio systems that you see in cars the fender system and the Volkswagen any sort of Bose system or rockford fosgate branded system in a Mitsubishi or a Nissan Juke already uses this technology and it's basically what happens is om to have different requirements for what they they want out of an amp from a third party vendor then you the person flipping through your Crutchfield manual does and so they've already started like building these like small amps that don't take up a lot of space that don't draw more power than than they then the need to you know for a moderate amount but usually pretty good sound quality but what it was started to happen is that these sort of like small amp sneh rocker fosgate showed me 300 watt 2-channel subwoofer amp that was about the size of a paperback book a big paperback book but a paperback book that's great and they're starting to make these available to consumers who you know want to add a little bit of extra sound to their car stereo without basically you know making their trunk look like the cars from The Fast and the Furious some people still like the big high power amp oh yeah the showpieces with like lights on them yeah what are the best hub but the advantage to these smaller ramps is that they don't draw ton of power they don't do things like dim your headlights and and and and you usually don't really require like a ton of you know fuses and and and whatnot they're usually kind of designed just you want to add a little bit of extra punch to the speakers that are already in your doors you just want to upgrade your speakers and your doors or maybe you want to add a small eight inch sub or something like that that's what you would do with these but start to see a lot more of that sort of in the aftermarket yeah I'm excited about that because I've got the small XIII and just slipping one of those under one of the seats or something right great I mean there's not much room in that car for anything so one thing that I think is kind of cool is that alpine also has like their tiny power amp it used to be specific to alpine units you buy it you plug it into the backyard i'll find head unit nelson you have 45 watts rms instead of 45 watts max rms is average so what happens is when you buy an amp and it's 300 watts it's really 150 watts you get 300 watt and the peak so they've made their sort of small power pack amp universal now also you can basically buy it for any car stereo wire it in line so it's we're starting to see not even not just the amp companies but also like companies like Alpine who do a broader sort of car stereo and car audio video stuff getting involved so definitely the wave of the future there I think this is going to do four amps what digital amplification did for subs in the 90s cool cool one thing that was really cool for me when I got off that when I and ended Detroit director Loudon in Las Vegas is actually in Detroit the first part of that week Antoine was actually at consumer electronics show the full week I showed up a late Wednesday and first thing getting in hotel look out there's a fisker karma sitting out in front of the hotel randomly randomly and for chai knew the guy who was a the fisker rep who was with it and arranged for a drive so got my first drive in the fisker karma around the the mean streets of Las Vegas that was a very to drive so the fisker karma uses it's a serious hybrid system it's got electric motors powering the rear wheels then it's got a gasoline generator under the hood and it's got batteries it'll give it about 50 miles range then when you for anything above that you crank the engine cranks up and provides electricity this is very similar to the Chevy Volt although as the fisker rep pointed out or kind of hinted at there is no time when the gas engine in the fisker karma powers there were wheels unlike the Chevy Volt right which there are certain circumstances where it will so this was a really interesting experience driving this car around because for one thing it's a really gaudy looking car that's a very expressive car let's put it that way at an epic stash hey and it's got these huge fenders in this sports car look it's actually sedan it's gone four doors although only four seats too because there's the the tunnel down the center has this big lithium-ion battery and it felt it's so interesting the feeling of driving these cars cuz pushing the accelerator it just popped forward like really fast I mean you found that surge behind you and that's that electric torque which is you know feels like a locomotive what makes everyone loved the tesla roadster so much oh yeah it's not really fast well the tesla roadster is actually you know it has a good acceleration like under you know four seconds to 60 or thereabouts-- and this one you know the fisker karma is actually kind of slow in comparison because it's six point three seconds under optimum conditions right 260 they like on a slight decline that's what the batteries are full and when you have it in its sport mode the other mode they call it stealth mode now stealth mode is what I pertained I do in my and that's when you have it in self mode which actually saves energy more more the battery's energy uses a that's eight seconds to 60 which is very slow by sports car standards it's not bad by car standards yeah yeah I mean there's certainly you'll probably beat a honda fit we'd be the question is we've eatable that's a good question this is it worth the extremely large gap in their prices yeah 3 getting smoked by bolts that's that I but it is a really cool-looking car and it didn't I definitely like that electric to rest the way it powers forward with that it gets I think a maximum of 300 mile range with this the cabin was really interesting because so this is a luxury car eighty ninety thousand dollars get on the cabin and there's not a hint of leather yeah I know yeah and this has been cut what is there it's all this it's this fabric and then the representative fisher described it to me it's some thick kind of luxury industrial fabric that's supposed to be nice and enlisting pretty nice like cotton yeah he had so you need some story about it and yeah i'm sure probably made out of recycled PT bottle probably the last beyond you know nuclear winter but this is because this car was and you can get a fisker karma with leather but this one was the eco chic trim oh so eco she definitely made out of recycled bottles right means no no leather and the wood is actually all recovered would it's salvaged from like the bottom of Lake Michigan or some fires they had in southern california and was pretty nice looking would actually you know have that nice i mean they have got a very nice luxury feel on that cab and plugs into the smell like Lake Michigan okay we're good plus an LCD instrument cluster to which I don't I mean I think the graphics look good but there's still a problem with LCD instrument panels that I've seen so far where there's just this kind of flat look to them and obviously they're flat yeah but I don't know they're just they got to do something about the glass that tops them i think or the coding because right now i think they just look a little cheap I kind of think the best the best LCD instrument clusters are the ones that kind of like also build in maybe not necessarily mirror what we're kind of used to with analog but maybe maybe sit alongside analog stuff right I've seen some really hyper the cool ones where it's like you've got an analog tech but then you've got like two LCD and that that little bit of dimensionality in the actual physical tachometer makes the fake gauges a little bit more believable kind of mentally well the one in the mercedes-benz the one that can turn into your night vision view you know it's usually a speedometer and you cannot tell that that's not an analog speedometer of course not in the not to a jump out of that price class but the lexus LFA has a really good digital dashboard no but I think there are actually some physical components that none of none of the actual gauges or instrumentation is yeah I assume those will all improve i was also we had a picture of it up a moment ago on our feet here but we was also impressed by the fisker karma drive selector which is this little cluster of buttons you know forget shifter shift knob anything like that yeah there it is you know it's the drive you know dnr p buttons and just this little tiny cluster on the console and you don't need anything more you don't need a big shifter because it's electric all right elegant conceivably to only got one in one gear yeah yeah one reduction gear yeah so it was fun driving around Las Vegas in this car it powered along really nicely gotten a little impromptu you drag race with a old stingray course correcting it I saw a couple of drag race is happening on the street but I saw it was funny because it was almost like a scene from The Fast and Furious it was a toyota supra and a muscled out pontiac firebird hmm and i'm in the cab from the back of a what is it a ford transit and i just see them take off and they're both like squirreling around and just like looking at these guys like you guys keep it real in Vegas they don't see that around most of these anymore but happens we just like around like a bunch of flatland just go out in the desert and take off oh yeah concept of speed different we got to do a car special from Vegas I think that'd be a good idea what a real cooling to that and oh and the just one last bit about the Karma we also got into a little curvy bit of Road the you know we had a root sort of that I was directed to and one Kirby bit where the the Pisgah rep said oh there's no cops on the section we haven't seen so far I got to drive that and this car handled very nicely yeah it's partly the weight this it's almost 6,000 pounds right so it's a heavy car and that keeps it down it's also got big wide tires I don't know what the specs on them are but they're they're wide and thick and and so they add a lot of grip I kind of got the impression though and it really it turned really nicely steered really nicely seemed to be nicely balanced for the short stretch I mean haven't driven it you know how to track or anything but from this up from this short a little bit my impression is that it'll hold grip really well up to a point and once it loses it I think it would lose it in a big way oh because that weight you know once you once you finally lose grip and I think I'll hold it for a long time but once you finally lose it I think it's just gonna be like a 360 s and in the dirt all sorts of stuff yeah you don't want that alright so that is kind of our CES consumer electronics show wrap-up it was a fascinating show a lot of car stuff it's just such a growing area and so let's go take a look at what is in this way wait before you get into the car tikka rock yeah I just like to say that I've been vindicated you hello before the Detroit Auto Show we got like a little preview of the acura nsx and we were told that it was basically going to use the TL super handling all-wheel drive system and i was like oh hell no that's not going to work so i wrote a blog post basically basically begging acura not to ruin the nsx and basically telling them what you need to do to make this supercar awesome if you're stuck with your if you just if you're bound and determined to make it a hybrid and what I said was put the v6 hybrid engine in the back on the back axle or it's just where it's supposed to be it's designed to be a transaxle and then put those what is it like to 20 horsepower electric motors on the front axle where they won't really do any harm and it turns out that when the acura nsx was unveiled in Detroit last week while I was trying to keep an eye on two shows at the same time because I really wanted to be in Detroit it turns out that's exactly what they did yeah I was actually there and I got to talk to one of the acura reps and he told me they were really unclear in their press materials about how this powertrain was laid out but I finally got them to tell me and it's yeah it's like you said they put these of a 3.5 liter direct injection v6 mounted transversely behind the passenger cap compartment they have an electric motor I think it's a 30 kilowatt mode electric motor integrated with the transmission right for the rear wheels that whole thing powers the rear wheels it brings you to like 340 300 300 60 horsepower on the back axle yeah we should note pretty good for this small this is a two seater it's very much like the original NX in its layout and then yeah to I think of 20 kilowatt mutters I'm not sure the horsepower that gets 20 kill I think they only add up to like I think 20 total on the front axle as far as horsepower goes it's just kind of this is just the attitude right they give you torque steer our uh yeah torque vectoring dearie yeah yeah yeah the kind of torque certain yeah controlled torque steer not like mazdaspeed3 torque yeah so I think with this lightweight car in that that configuration sounds like a little handle really well right the accurate person I was talking to a crap i was talking to said it just like the system in the mdx just reversed right you know which you know they described that new i think they call esha w or something that is there's a term they use they just call them all SH aw but they don't actually they don't all do the same thing yeah you dig through i think i think actually i may have broken down the differences of them in an all-wheel-drive article that i Rove you can definitely look at the wikipedia article on sh-awd and it'll the torque splits different depending on what car you're getting and how it does that but this car come up to the your the way look did that come up to your expectation alright with it yeah I'm okay nothing studying here yep I mean I'm told that they're actually going to make it they our and so they they confirm that and I'm told her I'll get they're gonna build it in the United States hmm is that I the other rumors that I heard is that they're gonna build it here interesting huh so yeah I'm all for that I can't wait for show her eyes well I think it was kind of the star of the show it was it was really the concept e star of the Detroit show it which was a show they had a lot of really good solid production cars new models that are going to come out but this was the most interesting concept even though they said they'll produce it as well all right yes that may be why it got its little well moment in the Sun there or got its you know production approved by acura so anyway let's say let's take a look at what's in the scenic ride by the way no OTR this week yeah we don't have one for you but we should in the car right we should have one next week anyway this is what is in the cnet garage now next up we currently have the Chrysler 300 srt8 and the ford edge EcoBoost in the garage downstairs we're reviewing those right now those reviews should go up early next week expect to see those and then coming up we have the volkswagen jetta GLI autobahn edition which I don't even know what that means but it sounds it very cool plus the new nissan versa i'm looking forward to getting in this new affordable compact car alright that's it for car tech live I'm Wayne Cunningham in the studio with antuan goodwin here Steven Beecham at the controls you can follow us on twitter you can actually can read our site you can look at all they are show notes here at car tech cnet com and look at these links we've been talking about and you'll also follow us on twitter i am Wayne see underscore SF on Twitter and Antoine is aunt do a NT g 00 on twitter and brian coolio should be back with us next week is Brian Cooley which is just one word on Twitter alright thanks guys you