Gadgetory

CNN digs up Toyota's unintended acceleration issue GM matches production to sales and juniper research predicts 2016 will be the year of the connected car this is car tech live for March fifteenth 2012 r250 fifth show I am Wayne Cunningham in the studio with antuan goodwin and Mitch Chang on the controls here Brian Cooley isn't here yet again don't fret though he will be back sometime i think in april he plans on coming back he was pretty busy this month though yeah i think he's actually a frayed of the cars we have in our garage right now we got some good ones to discuss that later in the show yeah but let's move on right away into this story you know last year wait I had the whole issue of unintended acceleration or the previous year I don't know is a long time ago it seems like and people were saying oh these cars are just taking off randomly like a Toyota Prius apparently took off away from somebody and they had trouble keeping control it was racing down the freeway out of control well that issue was sort of laid to rest by a National Highway Transportation Safety investigation and Twitter's own engineers but CNN found this memo amongst it was actually a memo from a Japanese testers Japanese engineers that were working on a system in a Lexus actually the lexus ls460 and said they found an unintended acceleration problem according to cnn's translation of the document what's interesting is dates all the way back to 2006 yeah this this sort of confidential document that they dug up and the big sort of unintended acceleration stuff can happen in 2010 so I guess the but they're indicating here is that this may be something that Toyota knew about long before even people started making a big noise about it yeah now see toyota is saying that CNN is taking this this one little phrase in this report somewhat out of context at first toyota saying that it's translated wrong even though CNN got it translated three different times and then toy it also says that well this was actually in testing the it was the LS 460 they were the this test concerned and it concerned the adaptive cruise control system on the LS 460 and toyota says what happened was they were testing this car and they purposely sent a wrong impulse or something to the system they told it you know they sent some that a fault sensor in which case the thing for a fraction of a second just said ok you know maximum acceleration which I don't know why that would be the result of this test but you know the the engineer found this to be a problem and then they use this on when they were working on a separate car another car there's also they were developing and toyota also says that neither of these cars and either these systems actually we're ever brought to the US right i think the other car is the one atl which is I guess our toyota tundra yeah didn't hear too many issues about people with toyota tundra in unintended acceleration and I think it's because I don't know if you can get it out of cruise control on that vehicle right I don't think you can in the US yeah maybe another other other countries other regions but yet I don't think they have that that here so whether this is actually indicative of a wider problem with in Toyotas electronics I don't know I mean it would seem to be that from a toilet is saying that it's a fairly limited thing issue that they found out in 2006 and dealt with mm-hmm whether it means that all toyota you know vehicle electronics are iffy and i think that's what CNN is trying to dig up here i'm not really sure what the point is but they certainly had well the CNN article actually which we will post in the show notes to had some experts that commented on this as well saying that well it sounds like toilet I had an unintended acceleration problem with a yeah right actually identified way back when but what's I guess you know playing the devil's advocate looking at the other side of the coin there though I mean this is something an internal testing situation so when you're testing crap goes wrong that's the purpose of testing is to find those things that are wrong and to fix them without documents surrounding this or more and surrounding or exactly without omniscient knowledge of what's happening it leading up to this test and then following this test it's difficult to know if this is just oh yeah we had it a bit of an issue here we worked that bug out and moved on or if this is something that he just kind of deprioritized and and shuffled off to the side because it was an acceptable level of failure yeah I mean you think if they had a memo about it and they said well let's make sure we look at this in other vehicles it is something they dealt with in in fact CNN's finding of this memo almost says that at where did you know identified a potential problem and then that will say I mean the fact that I knew it was there was you know when you test things when you crash tests and when these when car companies internally crash test cars I'm sure one or two of them explodes but then it's like whoa there's a bit of an issue there we fixed that and then we went to our you know our niche the testing yeah the problems not there that's the whole purpose of experimentation is part of the scientific process I want to be that crash test where the cars explode okay yeah you know but if they find something like that if the car does explode yeah they can put bracing around the gas tank yeah various structural changes to make sure it doesn't explode but I kind of you know the interesting thing is that this this test is kind of if the issue that they that they discover it in the confidential document seems to be tied into the adaptive cruise control system and I don't know if anyone sort of made a correlation between the unintended acceleration cases of 2010 and vehicles that were reported that we're actually a data that were actually equipped with adaptive cruise control or if there are parts of that adaptive cruise control system that were in place in vehicles that were not equipped just deactivated oh yeah that could be I mean certainly I mean you've got the base level most of these cars probably all these cars come with basic cruise control right and and also they're all drive-by-wire so you understand it the the basic of giving over throttle control to the ECU is there whether or not the adaptive control system is in place or not so it's really kind of a complicated gray area as far as like what's that actually in the vehicles and whether this issue that's been brought up even has anything to do with the 2010 issues and there's certainly plenty of those 2010 issues that were hoaxes or yeah people trying to game toyota for money or something like that people who got like a previous decided they didn't want it anymore yeah right or wanted new priuses every year know what I knew like yeah you know it's like those the people who used to like before the phone issues got really I guess when full warranties got really a stringent people would like find ways to quote break their phone at about the time that the new phone comes out so it's just like well I guess I gotta get an upgrade yeah iphone 3d Broca I needed to you know they can give me a 3d s then yeah so speaking of a car that actually had a bit of a well media problem yeah the Chevy Volt this is my Segway in our next story here the Chevy Volt there was this issue supposedly a bit bursting into flame or the battery packs Catching Fire if it crashed which was a very limited problem from what we've reported before but that actually caused an issue in sales right take kossler sales a decline such that in or that could have been part of the reason why their sales declined but they had sales of only about six hundred cars 600 Chevy Volts in January and that has caused them actually to choose halt production and they at the Chevy Volt plant for five weeks right the idea being that you don't want to keep pumping these cars out for them to sit on lots yeah so it's it starts costing money you know if your if your supply doesn't meet your demand so that's that's kind of what they're doing here yeah so they're idling the plant I mean yeah I'd be nicer they had a surplus of cars and they're practically giving them away i mean we could have a volt what I mean it doesn't work for any way for for GM's benefit to be in that sort of situation and then also the interesting thing is like just couple weeks ago we were saying that they actually raised their sales target for 2012 where they thought they were going to sell like sixty thousand of these yeah and now they're idling plant for a couple of weeks because they can't push him out to the Marcus because the markets not gobbling them up as fast as they're pushing him out yeah and you know the sad side of the story is there's thirteen hundred workers that have to sit around for five weeks right at this plan but there's some interesting in the story there's some interesting notes on the sales figures they note that GM tartan said they wanted to sell 10,000 of these cars last year hmm they they did the 7,000 something 7671 all right so that's about a c-grade yeah I think pass yeah yeah a little over seventy percent they're actually seventy-six percent you know pretty clearly Nissan actually sold almost 10,000 leaps yeah over over the year too so interestingly see that competition and certainly you know Nissan beat them out on that and it's you kind of wonder that because obviously the leaf has much more limited range than the than the Volt so I wonder what you know what is driving those sales well it's because if you're the kind of person who's jumping into the EV market right now you kind of are also the kind of person who gets a custom plate that says no gas right and you can't do that with a volt you can with a leaf you can like you can let your smug flag fly in a leaf and just say that I made the jump to complete electric I'm not just testing the waters with a gasoline car that can do electric range yeah so I think that the perception there is that especially for those sort of early adopters people who already have a second car and they just kind of want to get an electric car for commuting the volts more of a I don't have a car I want to buy the greenest car I can get yeah the Leafs like well you know we got an SUV already for road trips but they will get the leaf to drive around town and I think that most sort of early adopter EV drivers fit into that mold where they're just like oh I just kind of want to look for card so that I can out smug and out green my neighbor celebrities that sort of thing yeah it totally makes sense and the yeah with the the bolt you get sort of the the half adopt not exactly a full-on early adopter not not a full-on green you get this at a half green effect and there's probably fewer those people that are already dead which is interesting because you would think that the one vehicle for everything sort of approach would work best do you think more people would be interested in like picking up that not having to keep a second vehicle but I think the fact is that America is kind of a two-car household kind of country once you get outside of the extreme edges of the of the country yeah yeah I think that's true and also but one thing this makes me wonder is will GM consider you know will GM think well maybe we should have just done full electric car and not bothered with the whole you know gas engine generally extended-range thing well I mean I think that as people start to kind of adopt it and they get more comfortable with it the fact that the Volt is more flexible than the leaf lends itself to maybe a longer tail right as far as when you start talking about flyover States people who have like really long commutes or people who just want again again what do you just want one car who only have space in their garage for one car I mean that the vaults not really out you know down for the count in my opinion it just kind of seems like right now when we're in the early adopter stage it's that people kind of want the most cutting-edge thing and yeah in my mind and I sure in a lot of people's mind full electric is the most cutting-edge right and as far as the volta not being down and out there's a what supports that is the februari sales were actually 1200 so they pretty much double the sales / january and or I guess I said jump seventy percent over the prior month so yeah we'll follow the volt sales coming up through the next through the year to see if they are going to meet their sales targets yeah I mean I think it's a good thing they're actually not popping too many out on the market because that's you know the kind of thing they did in the past and you know end up with a lot of cars just sitting in lobby sitting on a lot then you end up with these like ridiculous sales yeah that are good for the consumer but not good for GM's bottom line and not good for I think the EV market when you when you start looking at when investors start looking at well you have X number of volts and just sitting around why would we invest money in this why would GM invest money and something they're not going to make cash on all right well one thing they also note 2 is that will probably help boost sales is that the Volt can now get California's it is now legal for the HOV Lane this was a change that GM made to the the gas engine so qualifies for the what we call the partial zero-emission vehicle yeah there's that ran five dollar gas yeah it's definitely going to get a lot of people kind of looking in that direction as far as like well you know may work out in the long run for me to ditch our regular four-door sedan for something a little bit more a little more green but a little less prius c yeah I mean that could def entire it to be interesting to see as and and I wonder about this too as you know more people see you say their neighbors have a volt and their neighbors sitting there go I'm like oh yeah you know filled it up once this month yeah you know and the neighbors like ah ok well that's that's a pretty good deal so well the neighbor effect is actually it's interesting that you bring that up where you know it's you know you read in magazines and and and you know this car exists but for a lot of people seeing them around town is really the kind of thing that gets you sort of looking at it yeah you start seeing it or you see one and then all of a sudden you start seeing them everywhere and that sort of thing kind of makes the vehicle real in people's mind I think for a number of people in the United States the Volt's one of those concept cars where you're just like yeah there are they ever actually going to make it alright well they are making it but I just think that you know it just kind of needs time to to spread and again but as opposed to the leaf I feel like that you have a better chance of seeing the Fulton and and in in Utah yeah then you would leave yeah it's interesting to you because looking around San Francisco here and this is obviously this area is sort of a hotbed for early adopters and people are going to jump on these you know ultra green cards I certainly see a lot more Leafs around especially in the last couple of months between a surprising amount of leaves just you know roaming the roads around San Francisco and yeah barely any votes I've been seeing a couple of volts yeah but they're mostly around around automotive events yeah usually a journalist I mean right yeah testing out another one well let's move on to the issue of the connected car which is a big area in car technology and area with it you know obviously we focus a lot of time and in covering and there there's a new report by this company juniper research does a lot of analysis of consumer trends things like that and they are predicting 100 million connected almost a hundred million connected cars on the road by 2016 it's a lot of cars yeah what they're saying is actually about 92 million vehicles will have internet connectivity in 2016 and so that's four years from now where they drawn the line for internet connectivity would something like on Star count uh I guess it depends on if it's actually drawing in data what they're saying is actually going to drive most of this these numbers is the connected phones you know or in vehicle systems that are driven by the data connection in your smartphone this is like the Toyota and tuned system this is like some of the other systems that are starting to come out there like Ford's Appling so and i can see that because that's the that's really the easy and cheap way to get connectivity into a car it absolutely makes sense to me that this would be the way it happens right yeah because I mean the smartphone market is pretty much booming yeah I think anybody who's buying a new phone now is probably buying something with some sort of smartphone Internet connectivity and yeah automakers giving people an option for that only makes sense yeah when they build integration into the dashboard and you know you have other things like Audi doing there their built-in connected car they're built in 3g connection into the Audi the a six seven and eight initially and eventually the three yeah we've seen it in a three and a lobbyist going today four and a five to that kind of thing I mean yeah I think a lot of companies will put in these dedicated connections like that the problem there is of course they won't happen until the next upgrade to that car and we know that happens pretty slowly whereas car electronics are actually starting to cycle a little faster right and and also when you get in the you know the cars that most of us drive the the economy cars the under thirty thousand dollar cards it's much more likely you're going to get a head unit that can work with your smartphone as opposed to a dedicated 3G or 4G connection and that car right but on those lines we also so last week was last week or a couple weeks ago Mobile World Congress actually I was a couple weeks ago two weeks ago just before we left for Virgin Eva right just for the Dean of a show well HTC had demoed something at that show that we've got an article on here it's one of their phones that when you dock it it automatically goes into this car mode and it seems like it's a you know they're definitely thinking about the automotive market and thinking about how they can make their phones be the preferable phone for being docked into a car right and once they call it the car stereo clip that actually makes the transfers the audio feed over bluetooth and works with the cars systems with the car stereo things like that and so that you know the phone can host certain approved functions like navigation or you know audio things like that right i mean the interesting thing for me is that seem to recall the droid one doing this it had like a car clip that hasn't like a magnet in it and when you clip the phone into it the magnet trigger to car mode that i think is kind of built into the core or at least used to be built into the core of what android is I'm not particularly sure what's in words what's different here other than its HTC's interfaith love it or hate it HTC likes to do their own sort of interface but they're sort of sent to you I so this kind of to me looks like you know they've kind of built a car cradle mode into sense which is I think something that's been missing from from a lot of their phones for the last couple generations so do you think this will be something i will drive people to look at HTC phones more when they're considering a phone for their car or phone for daily use well I mean the automatic sort of you know changeover is interesting but it seems like you have to buy their car stereo clip I do like that it seems like the the connections are built into the cradle so you can pretty much leave this stuck on your dashboard or windshield and plugged into your car at all times and just get in the car and snap it in as opposed to like a third party where you have to you know snap your phone into the thing and then you know it shouldn't it initialize the bluetooth pairing and then maybe if you're not doing bluetooth physically do the 3.5 millimeter plug in every time so there's a convenience factor here but then there are also if you're if you're willing to go those one or two extra steps and then even if your phone doesn't have a car mode built into it there are car mode apps in the android market excuse me the google play market right now and i mean you could you could do this by yourself but i guess that's sort of the thing about android is that pretty much anything that any OEM wants to you know it out of the feature you can probably do yourself mhm it's a little bit of know-how but yeah i'm all for locking people out of things that would be considered distracting while driving and making the things that you actually want to do while driving easier yeah yeah i'll be interesting to see you know when this comes out ice well we'll have to try to give it a test once once they make this available but i would assume this would count towards juniper researchers hundred million internet collections of cars or 92 million anyway one thing that will definitely count in that flavor is sprint actually signed a deal vista now so they don't now it's much beyond if they sign this deal but they signed this deal to become the wireless engine in Chrysler Group's you connect program so Chrysler calls all their telematics all there in in vehicle entertainment systems information systems you connect and they don't differentiate between them either just you connect yeah what does that mean it means you got Bluetooth or maybe you got an a ver maybe you've got some internet connectivity or maybe there's an auto net router in your car we don't know it's all you connect right it's not one feature just a big bunch of stuff a huge umbrella that's extremely confusing for me but this is kind of cool though that sprint they'd sign this deal with sprint because you know that's kind of huge to actually have a you know telecom provider like this on board mm-hmm so that definitely means there's going to be some kind of dedicated connection built into the end of the cars at least a some option level or some you know well let me they'd have to I mean even Hyundai has blue and what is it what is there a link link yes almost at blue and me but even Hyundai's got telematics now and I mean I kind of feel bad saying even Hyundai like that they're pre cutting-edge company now yeah but it seems like everybody's kind of getting on board with some sort of in-car telematics you don't really have to do anything but by the car and you're you're going so yeah it's good to see the Chrysler Group getting involved in this yeah I guess we don't know if this means that it will be a telematics system like on Star where you punch an operator and you're a punch a button and get an operator and say oh my car crashed or whatever or a system of apps you know if they're going to power apps and that kind of thing in in their their dashboard maybe they don't even know yet I mean it would have to be some sort of like integration into the data if at this point in the game just being able to hit a button and talk to an operator it's not a selling point anymore yeah i mean that's that was on Star like half a decade ago and that was great ving but now it's got to be more built-in there's got to be some sort of like web search google search in the dashboard for points of interest for it to even really seem like it's worth doing this otherwise why not just use your bluetooth para phone if you're just making a phone call like there's really no need for a partnership there right on the other side of the issue here verizon is actually debuting a new telematics telematics practice they're calling it so another major telecom company providing some kind of in-vehicle thing now they haven't signed any d them and announced many deals with any car companies but what's interesting here is they actually have this guy martin fall who have met before who used to be used to run Microsoft's automotive practice mmm this is the guy that over oversaw the development of sync so you know and also the septic going in the Hyundai Kia infotainment systems too so you know that's pretty good pretty good pedigree and he's going to so he's got a lot of connections with automakers and he's going over to verizon and heading up a new you know in vehicle telematics practice and I guess they're say what I they talking about here one as quote here he mentions their 4g LTE cloud analytics capabilities it's talking about what they can do so you know he's touting um you know Verizon's 4G LTE is being a good base or good data pipe for you know that their telematics right and we should mention the telematics can mean pretty much any connected aspect to a car yeah and I mean even though like a lot of car a lot of car stuff that you do in the car is kind of low bandwidth you're searching for points of interest you're getting weather updates you that sort of thing but I mean any sort of like jump in speed if it takes you one second to download a traffic update on 3g and it takes you half a second on 4G I mean that's half a second less that you've been looking at the dashboard at waiting for something to load and at another half-second you can spend looking at a car or you're doing like 70 miles per hour that's a couple hundred feet of asphalt that you can spend looking up so the faster the connection in the car the better I think yeah wait waiting for things to update or you know if you have a list of probably get some of the stuff that showed up in that when we were testing the Twitter and tune system well just like doing something like a Bing search for the nearest gas station yeah or I mean he probably wouldn't want to do this while you're rolling but then in the in the Entune you can look up movie times and purchase tickets on the movies calm or like set up a reservation through opentable so if you're you know parked on the side of the road which you probably should be if you're doing a lot of button pushing you know being able to make that table reservation a couple of seconds faster means you can get on the road faster yeah it's been less time sitting in the car idling less fuel wasted all that sort of thing right it's also frustrating to sit there waiting for a screen to load on in your car when you know like on your cell phone or at home on your computer little load a lot faster right and I mean the interesting thing about the the Entune system is if powered by your phone so I did it on a 4g phone and it was pretty quick yeah I don't really have much experience using it with an iphone with a 3g connection but let me I could you know i'd imagine that it would still be pretty quick but if you can be blazing quick sure why not yeah i found myself using the 3g phone waiting for Bing results to come up waiting a significant amount of time to which was it was a little annoying and I thought that might be a killer for the system that if it doesn't really update fashion out there and it might have been more maybe is more of an iphone issue as opposed to android gonna be android powers it better maybe it works better with android yeah when when they demonstrated the the Entune system for us at the camry launched last year all of the cars had droid x's in them yes i'm thinking like yeah they probably well maybe they just didn't want to put iphones in all the cars because it does look a lot cooler when you can go like and then you got the system here and then you just toss the phone in a cup holder yeah with an iphone you'd have to be plugged up to USB and there'd be like a cable and it's not a sexy quote-unquote for like a press demo so maybe that's the reason why but yeah the wireless yeah the wireless interaction with the phone in the car is much neater it seems to be at some point the Bluetooth connection is going to be a bottleneck for that speed so getting back to verizon here i'm thinking they're probably talking about embedded sort of things that are actually going to be in the vehicle themselves because i think 4g is way faster than then that sort of bluetooth pipe i can possibly be so yeah yeah and personally you know I think the having the connection built into the car is it's obviously a much more solid way to go I don't know it's certainly you know I think it's I think it's a better connection generally running it through a phone is sort of a kludge yeah well you know I like that that you know that the different solutions exist yeah I mean personally I I kind of enjoy it and I prefer being able to run things through the phone the interesting thing about in tune is that that apps on your phone so you can start the drive you can start the navigation process before you even get in the car you can start you know the the opentable destination search from the Entune app before you know while you're walking to your car yeah and then just hop in and in start moving it's something that's embedded in the vehicle maybe wouldn't be as seamless there that's true i mean i was in cons to both sides yeah there's definitely different ways of doing it and you know i think at least currently with the prices and all that that you know if you have say a toyota yaris the phone integration solution is actually probably more likely than having a whole chipset and yeah if you get a toyota yaris the suction cup on the windshield is probably the best one for you yeah most likely but well so we'll be looking forward to seeing what is going to come out of this verizon practice if we'll see some new car makers announced 4G connections into the car because they'll be excited we haven't actually seen 4G connection into a car just yet but falling on our whole connected car talk here are news stories here which we have a bunch of them this week BMW this is just a little small note your BMW announced adding to their whole app interconnectivity they've got the they're adding stitcher now they've had pandora mog facebook twitter i think they've got anything else in those apps yet yeah you got that weird mini connect thing oh right yeah but yeah stitcher being like I like to think of it as like the stream podcast but they're apparently they I guess they like to say radio shows yeah but yeah it basically allows you to to stream a curated collection of like five styles and podcasts right which I'd assume would have us on there too I think so i haven't looked at it in a while but I had that we're on there well I think you can choose the am sure we are in there well they says access to over 5,000 radio show so maybe we didn't make the cut well I mean the thing is if if the podcast company is if you have a podcast and you to be on stitcher I think it's a key like again it's accurate list so you have to send them a special feed if you can't just punch in an RSS feed in the stitchery go like yeah I want that unless things have changed again it's been a hate to admit it but it's been about a year since i've used stitcher so maybe things have changed but i think they've got a lot of the you know the big shows on there you know the they got the NPR on there they've got who i can't think of who else is on there adam carolla's on there if you can stand to listen to that guy for more than an hour at a time but yeah it's interesting that it's on there and I mean even if you don't use stitchers is good news because it's proof that BMW still actively courting more more more of these internet streaming audio apps so I think it's safe to assume that you know eventually they'll get around to all of them yeah it's interesting the way it works in the BMW is that with Facebook and Twitter and this is kind of like in tune as well you have a the BMW ConnectedDrive app and that actually gives you access to Facebook and Twitter in the the the cars interface and so I'm assuming they added stitcher to that list now Pandora and mog you actually have to launch those apps separately yeah and if you're using an iphone you can only launched one at a time so slowly you can't really listen to pandora and mog at the same time well that's true so there's that but I mean you couldn't do so your Shores are saying is you can't be listening to pandora and then send a tweet that fizz I'm in my BMW and it's 72 degrees Fahrenheit exactly yeah you're sort of then you have to go to the phone switch apps on the phone and then go back to the interface right which is not an ideal that's not a seamless solution and I imagine somebody you know well there you have to be able to protect center in the bay area here I'm sure they're looking at ways to make that that work better because they seem to have a good handle on that so right we'll be looking to see what they do and how this to have this set your implementation comes I guess the next time we get a BMW and you'll reacquaint yourself a stitcher or well oh yeah maybe I will I think it's actually worth checking out to see if we're actually on there yeah um just cuz now i'm curious my ego wants to know if i'm on stitcher right now yeah you gotta be able to listen to some stitcher and I was actually looking briefly at their site here and I don't see us pop right up but I'm sure were in there somewhere I'm sure but he'll outs on there how it is sex I just found it but oh yeah there you go if was that loud Zaun their we're on there somewhere I sure hope so so that is all the news for this week let's let's go out on the road Antoine and I take a little drive in the 2012 BMW 650i this is a big coupe the 6-series is a big I got a GT style coupe but it's not curvy like a lot of the Italian manufacturers BMW makes us it has really straight lines in this but Antoine you don't really care for the look of this car though well I mean it's not my favorite BMW it definitely looks a lot better than the old model i keeps now that now that this one's in the garage i keep seeing the the old six series around town it just looks horrible it's definitely a better looking car but still far from what I would consider attractive yeah i like it i think they improve this look a lot from the previous generation this is really the first of the new generation because the previous one lasted from about two thousand three to 2010 with maybe some minor updates there we go and that is a courtesy of the fact we're in sport mode plus which takes off the traction control and stiffens up the suspension and also does a couple other things it makes the acceleration more responsive like that hey doesn't do so well over this rough terrain like it on that smooth sort of area it was nice but that left turn is kind of bumpy I think I'm gonna go into comfort for the rest of this review talk about the cabin tech here along with this fantastic beggin Olufsen audio system this is the premium audio system here it's i got 3,800 dollar option 1200 watts 16 speakers sounds excellent looks excellent yeah it's big about these nights metal grilles and they actually have this little they call it an acoustic lens that pops up in the center of the dash very neat stuff but we also have an excellent app integration here this is the part that just cracks me up so this is like a BMW connected sort of things you install on your cell phone and then your phone talks to the car we've got Facebook Twitter web radio and calendar calendar is pretty cool because actually looks at all the appointments I have my calendar and shows those on the screen here but let's take a look at what's up and pushed it to Twitter today so we got brian Tong here we've got automotive news we've got one of my own tweets so if we click on what a quick one of my tweets here it shows the text on the screen along with my beautiful picture and that if I put the cursor over this read out item here we get this wonderful time out driving at the big BMW 650i yesterday red car had those rain-soaked roads well that what do you think of the car reading out Twitter I eat the thing about that the Twitter function is it's cool for the person sitting in the passenger seat but it put it makes you go through so many steps to get to the reading out of the feed that by the time you get there you've already kind of read it twice that's true I'd say you know you have to you have to go into the menu you have to go to Twitter and then you have to scroll through the Twitter feed to fund the tweet that you want it to read it's only 140 characters by the time you hit the button for read you could have read it already right and glanced at it and see it of course if they follow mrs. new guidelines about car entertainment systems or car in vehicle information systems is they point out they only want that they're recommending to only 30 characters yeah text visible at any time at any time yeah it like period right they don't want scrolling text either oh yeah that's uh I don't know that it's a cool feature and I will say this the part of Twitter integration that I think is actually useful is the integration with the navigation so when you punch in a destination so you you're leaving work you're headed home you can tell it to tweet your ETA so i can say i'm i'm leaving work now expecting to arrive or wherever you're going at in and out burger and in 45 minutes so that you can let people know where you're going that you're probably going to be a little late but then you don't have to pick your phone up and send a text message that is a pretty cool and useful feature actually yeah as opposed to just being like I don't know what Joe's doing everything else is just it seems like they the world that they already had Twitter in the car and they're like well we'll just do some fun things with it but as far as actually being useful that's kind of the only way that I see that sort of Twitter or Facebook integration being being interesting well what they should do actually is you know is the first screen you get is just a list of all the Twitter say Twitter tweets that you have in your feed and they should have a button right there it lets you but lets you make the car read it out I mean just like read all of them again in order you can do it individually huh you know I'm added I don't see any reason why they couldn't do that as opposed to making you go into the tweet itself where you can actually see the whole suite on the screen and then pushing the extra little button that says read it out to me what's also weird is that it tries to read URLs yeah so it'll go you know you should check out this camera HTTP colon slash slash cnet.com respect less of that now in our little video there there was a little point where you got a little squirrely with the car well was trying to do a donut but we were in sport mode Sport Plus mode so it actually did let the tail swing out a little bit we had like a nice big so open flat parking lot area there but it still stepped in and in and caught the car like midway through my perfect bernal so it it seems like it will let you have a little bit of fun but it won't let you wreck it well I mean it may let you wreck it but it'll try it's best not to yeah that's what I found with BMWs with that their their traction control with their when you get into their you know support plus traction control system yet does and even in the regular DT dynamic traction control they call it there's a certain point and it's like it'll let the rear end like drift out like five feet or something you know but it's right but it does really step in at a certain point and say okay that's enough I think there's a stability control button that you could like turn it off yeah and so then then if you just want to sit there and ruin a perfectly good set of rear tire right pretty fast car yeah a lot of power yeah kind of soft though even in it will I mean in the Sport Plus mode we were on a really rough road and and I do we have adaptive suspension in that car it did yeah okay so then the Sport Plus mode it it felt really rough over that really rough road but I think it's a big car so it still manages to feel kind of a GT comfortable yeah even if you're on like a relatively smooth Highway expansion joints probably won't bother you too much well there's a big difference between this the the sixth series and the way BMW does there there's suspension tuning and say like mercedes-benz now driving an s-class with the aromatic suspension that I mean does a fantastic job just like oh yeah there's a pothole area I didn't feel it yeah you know in this one you will feel the bumps in the potholes to a certain degree I mean the car will mask them pretty well but you know you'll definitely know there's road that you're going over right so it's pretty good on that you know I like the steering feel on this car I think the it does what BMW been doing you know an excellent job with four years of making it feel like a car that you're driving making it feel like you've got to be engaged with the driving experience yeah and it doesn't actually feel or look as big as I think it is I think the six series is is about as long if not maybe a hair longer than seven series but when you see it in the video there it looks like a much smaller car and when you're sitting in it unless you're trying to like ease out into an intersection a blind intersection you don't really start you don't really realize how far out the nose is because it does give you really good visibility you are always kind of aware of where your corners are ya and I Duke I do like that about the vehicle yeah I liked it you know conservative the one of the big sixes or the big six is the phrase it always comes to mind for this car because it does have a certain laughed and feel to it and it is you know most be above your cars yeah it's up there with the seven has been a you know a decent sized one and certainly the insurance / give them five but interesting enough we actually saw the m6 version of this at Geneva rightly the last week and those you know they use actually the same engine architecture they both use the 4.4 liter v8 with two twin scroll turbo but they managed to get my hundred more horsepower out of the m6 version right which may just mean bigger turbos generally possibly are they using the twin scroll twin turbo situation and the m5 I would assume yeah m6 it so it's makes look the same engine out of the m5 it is yeah but stuffed into a coupie kind of car all right a car that may be more deserves the M hey you know I think the m5 earns its in bed yeah I haven't driven it but I've seen a lot of it on paper it definitely earns the embed I mean it did I think the interesting thing about that having different M cars the m5 the m3 of course and I don't know if we have it we don't have an imp this generation but they do allow people to choose their level of involvement so like a car like the m5 and the in the m6 I've always been kind of like cue cards you know they're really big they're faster than they look definitely whereas something like the the m3 is you know more of a detective to the track it did say it feels way more comfortable and that sort of let the tail hang out environment where you know and then and even more so it's something like an m coupe or I guess 11 m yes case yeah a car that you don't think deserves the imagine yeah the little one I think BMW got a little profligate with the M badge actually but I need to come back to the looks of this car and this is a point of contention you you mentioned earlier you said you'd never met a BMW M or a BMW 6 Series II that you like well I mean I did see like a nice vintage m6 last night with the really sort of boxy shape yeah um I got that look kind of cool I got one up on my screen here Mitch can you bring this up here yeah yeah saw one of those last night with the center exhaust yeah it was red and I thought that's kind of cool in a sort of retro kind of way but I mean I think even that it seems like the the back end of the car came off of another vehicle it just seems very very front heavy um visually yeah something I still don't love it I like the look at this car a lot this is the 84 633 CSI which is comes to about the last I don't think they made MIT or made the 633 after this year it's got a particularly high greenhouse something you don't really see too much in current cars but i don't know i i'd definitely like this car a lot i like the way the oh the front looks it's kind of nice and it's got that well they called this card the shark was its nickname and it had a you know that mean obviously i hit a fan of this got a car for a while you know the nose is kind of low the rear end drops off nicely that was the problem with the when they revived the six series in last decade that they had to make the trunk the cycle he said a wart like thing yeah and the new one has not quite the drop off is the original but it still looks like part of the car at least right so from that since you know I like it and I like the new one one quite a bit and I think other people had seen that here might might disagree with your assessment because well I mean again I think we're coming off of like five years of the worst-looking car ever maybe a little more than five years actually but the the previous generation that the the the 2011 would do when they come out 2006 2000 between 2000 2004 was actually the the right revival of the sixth year there we go yeah so from then till about last year I mean it was a mess yeah it was a disgusting mess of the vehicle so the new six it just I don't know it something about it and I'm pretty sure this is part of the appeal of it but it it doesn't look ugly but at the same time it just kind of looks plain and dull and most from most angles and then from the rear it still seems a little visually complex to me yeah yeah you know it certainly doesn't have the nice big curves of like an Italian design cut when you think of like a you know Italian GT with big swooping fenders and stuff like that yeah just looks like a semi from the side it looks like a cigar I mean there aren't very many character lines or any sort of it's it's not a car that looks fast sitting and I think that that's something that this that the 6-series needs it needs some sort of like it needs to look fast and it just to me looks big yeah and so again I respect it i think it's an improvement over the last generation but I'm not in love with it definitely well I I respect how you brought you you bolstered your opinion here but I still love it I still like the looks of it and it's time actually to take a look at what use are currently in our garage we've got the Jaguar XK RS which is actually much much it's kind of it's a GT car too and it probably looks a bit better than the 6-series lot better than the six here yet and the 2012 porsche 911 this is the porsche 911 update which we like to look up quite a bit as well we also took a quick spin in the the fiat 500 abarth oh right yeah we've got that that write-up on the site right now the Fiat Abarth the 500 abarth the fun little fast car and these are reviews of the Porsche 911 and Jaguar xkr-s should be up next week so that's all we've got for you this week thanks for listening you can look at our show notes car tech cnet com will have the links for some of the stories we discussed and you can watch us all on video any time you please and you can follow us on Twitter Brian Cooley is bri NC 0 0 le y on Twitter I am way porn WWAY for any on Twitter and Antoine is aunt you a MTG 00 on twitter so follow us on twitter and thanks for listening you