Gadgetory

the Infiniti G basically made the brand a sporty sedan and coupe duo that struck a very loud chord with buyers from a1 to 2013 and here's what's next let's drive the all-new all tech q50 and its hybrid escort for now it's easy to spot one of these guys there's another daring leap for infinity and if you've seen their o Rouge show car on the circuit lately kind of faithful to that overall look and it lacks some of the pudgy nested a few of its more recent siblings have now what makes this an s first of all you've got bigger disk rotors all around and bigger calipers clamping on them bigger wheels 19's instead of 17s little different face makes it about an inch longer than an on ass car and inside you've got sports seats and magnesium shifter paddles in front of you kind of a standard gauge layout tach speedo fuel only give wait you're in a hybrid is that little swing gauge down that it tells you if you're recharging on the left or tapping electric power on the right star the shows right here in the center console not one but two screens both are touch both are also driven by an infiniti controller knob down here and both are also accessible by voice the one down here is the really impressive one a very iPad like and not by accident just for destination alone look how many choices you got there are eight ways to get where you're going we're not done yet scroll over and you've got another five do I really need 13 ways to find my destination we've seen a lot of these various things before in the apps panel but not this before the app garage this is kind of a little miniature App Store for this vehicle clock and compass you don't care about those drive performances interesting this is going to bring up a set of driving gauges on three different panels it'll show you things anywhere from economy to dynamics it's kind of a weird hodgepodge but I must say it does remind me of what happens in the Nissan GTR where you've got addressable gauges a virtual instrument panel to accompany the one in front of you on the sillier side of course you can pull up Facebook more useful you have Google online search in here all of this is through your tethered phone by the way this is not one of those cars it has built-in 3G or 4G now infinity connection is a series of online services that are tied in through your phone with an app called the Infinity in touch app it gets you things like pulling in a schedule connected search you can search and then they have to something sent a car from a Google search on another machine a computer what have you the last thing I want to show you in this interface is the Infinity drive mode selector similar to what Ally's had in their drive mode select for a while so my personal mode can have engine and transmission settings of any of these four I can set up my steering for heavy standard or light quick standard or casual response and active trace control where it uses braking inside the curve to yaw the car around the corner and all that ties back to a drive mode rocker switch here on the console which runs you through three modes you've got Sport and you can take it down to standard and also down to eco now under audio just about everything you want is in here AM and FM with HD Sirius XM still have a disc player in here they haven't jumped on the trend of unloading that iPod connectivity as well nice clean well used interface I think and of course bluetooth streaming audio now above this beautiful in touch controller is some very impressive turn polishing that's been going on this is kind of your standard Nissan navigation map interface but notice they've cleaned it up it's got much tighter dot resolution they have finesse to the look but it still is jarring li out of place to my eye compared to the instrument panel and the in touch controller this is beautiful modern stuff this is last decade kind of yanked into the present like we've seen in some honda products lately you get an awful lot of duplication do it here with one interface look at that or you can do it down here with another interface and they aren't identical that's not great UI that's one of the kinds of distractions that car makers often forget about now under the hood we've got a three and a half litre Nissan v6 but of course it's hooked up to an electric motor as well that in this car is not about a lean green weenie hybrid this is about a performance hybrid horsepower 328 off the gas engine plus sixty-seven off the electric motor at net South o2 360 torque is 269 foot-pounds off the engine 214 off the electric motor but you can't exactly sum those let's just say it's a lot four point nine seconds 0 to 64 rear wheel drive 5.2 if you get all-wheel drive and that's for a car that way is almost exactly two tonnes it's not the lightest car out there 28 34 mpg for this rear-wheel drive configuration so notice we're not reaching for astronomical fuel efficiency mean we drove a Accord plug-in recently that was kind of doing near 50 all the time but that was aimed at a different kind of driving the only transmission you can get is a 7-speed conventional sort of automatic the base car if you will is rear-wheel drive or you can also option it to all-wheel drive we recently did a segment on CNET on cars about electric power steering but Infiniti is doing something in this q50 that's kind of unprecedented look what's happening here with their direct adaptive steering the wheel becomes kind of a game controller telling these electronic control units here what they should tell the electric steering rack to do this is steer-by-wire folks the benefit of this is you get lightning fast response from your steering inputs from the wheel and those front wheels can steer at slightly different angles which is actually a good thing they can have their own little independent take on what you're telling them to do with your steering input can lead this amazing handling improvements now if you're spooked by the fact this is all done electronically notice that here in the steering column there's a clutch and if this electronic system fails that clutch re-engages and now you have a traditional mechanical steering column back in place so you're back in control of the car now we see a lot of cars these days that have lane departure warning and prevention fairly common stuff but on this menu in the Infiniti it's right next to lane departure but it's different active lane control is like a subtle cousin of lane departure instead of yanking you back from drifting the wrong lane it just keeps you right in your lane nicely centered he uses cameras to see if the lanes are bending slightly it can detect and correct for wind drift or even if the chatter in the bad road surface makes the car drift off of line it's super elegant and it basically does what you do as you're driving down the road what an amazing steering system this electric steer by wire is uncannily sharp and precise add to that this active trace control where it'll drag the inside brake to kind of yo you in and it's just an amazingly nimble biggish car now on the freeway that lane control technology is also like magic the first I've driven that is able to basically exhibit almost human-like instincts for noodling down the lane it's it's so subtle that's where the magic lies a lot of great power in this vehicle but you do have to coax that I find when I first hit the throttle almost a second before I get that boost of power that's not good one last note there is a look forward forward collision technology in this car that goes a step further it's not just predicting collision with the car in front of you it can they say predict and prevent a collision based on the behavior of the car in front of the car in front of you the downside is I don't have any way to test or demonstrate it without setting this car back to infinity on a flatbed truck so want to take their word for it but I believe that's also a first okay you can get into a new q50 for as little as thirty seven thousand dollars but not this q findi we've got a hybrid and we've got an S so we're talking nearly forty eight thousand dollars page delivered here's the weird one almost 1500 more for navigation that's right this car does not come standard with nav or satellite radio that nav package is how you get both I'm kind of irked by that now the big one is the deluxe technology package five thousand dollars but I think it's worth it because that's a huge package of almost all of this driver assistance and handling assistance tech that we were so impressed by so while it's chunky I don't think it's a ripoff all in word about 54 to delivered CNET style that's rear wheel drive all wheel drives going to add 1800 what infiniti is done here is push the envelope in two or three important areas of driving technology they've wrapped it up in a really good-looking package and they've decided to take hybrid the performance direction not so much the efficiency direction I want to see them simplify and refine that infinity in touch interface too much going on there and also bring it better in harmony with the main screen I also think they should improve throttle response because there's too much goodness under the hood of this car to let bad pedal linearity ruin it gee