Gadgetory

if you watch many of my videos you already know by now I'm not all that easily impressed by supercars 80% of them go to customers who use maybe 20% of what they can do and I'm not sure I would do much more but McLaren promises to get my attention with this guy which they say is not just super high performance but super livable let's find out as we drive the mp4-12c and check the tech if you're not into car racing or Formula One in particular here's a short course on McLaren they're serious but with this in elegantly named mp4-12c they've achieved a very elegant balance of street car and track car now the biggest technology in this car is the active suspension it creates both the Jekyll and the hide parts of this vehicle okay this rolling chassis shows us some of the magic of the mp4-12c first of all this is a carbon tub it weighs about a hundred and sixty hundred and seventy pounds that's it and it is the primary piece of this car structure front and rear aluminum subframes in the front you hang the suspension off and it brings the front of the car to life in the rear you've got the engine mounted back there now your typical car is gonna have a sway bar running across here and all the suspension components are largely being driven by gravity the vehicles weight and the wheels across the car kind of tied together fighting each other but this McLaren does is this elaborate system a rather pretty plumbing pushing fluid back and forth under pressure varying pressure by the millisecond to these what appear to be coil struts but in fact what they're able to do is two things they can push back in corners to keep the car level doing what a sway bar does but smart and they can also change the shock rate the damper rate so the shock absorbers can go from being very firm to very soft depending what kind of driving you're doing after all that the engine is almost conventional almost 3.8 liter twin-turbo v8 doing 592 horsepower 443 foot-pounds of torque 0 to 60 in about three and a third seconds or less if you know what you're doing and yet 15 22 mpg told you had a split personality one gearbox a 7-speed dual-clutch automated manual controlling all that power are these two switches that move the handling or the powertrain from normal to sport to track I suspect you've noticed that LCD and wondered how it got that way while McLaren mounted it in portrait mode to allow for a narrower console to that same end they moved the climate controls out to the doors navigation will be available along with all the modern audio sources but that kind of tech isn't paramount here this is that won't always pose me I'd be that guy you see on the television broadcast in the wall but a lot of cars can go fast around a track peeling off onto local streets that's really eye-opening and it's got many modes that go beyond the most comfortable I mean what's called the normal mode I'm letting it do everything automatically click press the little button that says inactive and maybe you've got a whole new world of possibilities it's all over here called agents your handling system you've got normal sport and track pretty self-explanatory their levels of aggression for how the adaptive suspension works and then over here the one called pious performance or powertrain actually normal sport and tracked again that's gonna map your throttle and change how the gearbox operates there's something else in this card as part of these controls that you haven't seen before uniquely McLaren it's called the isg the intake sound generator and check this out when you builder the more aggressive modes like sport or tracked it's going to vent in some of that raspy blood-curdling hair standing exhaustion just to remind you that you are driving a very impressive view now the cars got high-tech written throughout it but not in the most extreme way they still have a good old-fashioned analogue speedometer a rounded though our full video gauges bar graphs for oil pressure water temperature fuel level and such and all kinds of powertrain indications inside this cars bleed am comfortable for a car of its size and I can't say that about every car in the supercar class some of them feel like you're driving a supercar all the time which is cool except you're not going to want to that much a car like this I think you would David E Davis once said that anybody worth anything at all and he still owned a 12-cylinder car once in their lifetime because that's a real sound he said it was nothing else quite like it well this is an eight cylinder car but I can guarantee you it's also a real sound and a real operatic experience we're about to enjoy that as we have one of the great look-at-me experiences of life in Los Angeles on a busy freeway with everyone looking this guy is set to track the exhaust flowing in and out of the car and we're gonna hit it if you like to turn heads this is your rock here in the market for a two hundred thirty thousand dollar car it's probably not your only car but the 12c has a wide enough range of personalities that it could be both your second and third cars it is utterly impractical the DCT gearbox occasionally gets that confused look around town they all do and I could actually do without the exhaust noise feature aimed at the back of my head it's throaty enough without but I think a few years from now you'll find 12 C's on the resale market with some decently high numbers on the odometer and for a car like this that's the ultimate compliment