Gadgetory

so we're here in New York to check out the karma Rivera Aliso Edition it's one of 15 in the world has 981 foot-pounds of torque and costs an eye-watering hundred and forty five thousand dollars which is great and all but like we're Linus tech tips why the heck are we here ah there we go so the back is filled of awesome prototype tech so let's take a look at what all of this does and a big thanks to DTS and photo nation for sponsoring this video if you feel like you've seen this car before well you wouldn't be wrong that's because both karma and the Rivero are heirs to Fisker Automotive Karma a car about as troubled as the period it was born in two major financial institutions have teetered on the edge of collapse and some have failed as a result our entire economy is in danger the company was plagued by several engineering and production challenges legal battles supply issues reliability shortcomings and became a political football for the guys in Washington and the financial troubles that came as a result of all that forced Fisker to shut its doors in 2013 but for all the things that gone wrong Fisker did get some things right the accelerated development process of the fisker karma generated quite a few technological breakthroughs and the core design of the car remains a thing of beauty even eleven years after its original unveiling so it's with those considerations that automotive supplier launched own group bought what remained of the original company in 2014 a mere year after having scooped up Fiskars then battery manufacturer and then rebranded it karma so while the Rivero may look much the same as its predecessor it's a completely different car under the surface everything from the wiring harness to the solar panel roof down to the powertrain is different with some less obvious stuff starting with the FM radio okay wait hold on okay so this came about as part of Karma's collaboration with DTS and it's actually cooler than it sounds so the prototype radio in here has album artwork and a like button well okay but Spotify already has that at which point we realized well why don't we expect this from radio the radio experience is basically decades behind with programmable stations still being a feature and the thing is some 80 percent of drivers apparently still rely on it for entertainment in their car so with DTS connected radio your car is able to use an IP connection to download metadata for digital and analog radio stations so you can get album artwork titles and artists the ability to like and share songs and of course my personal favorite the ability to see exactly what's playing on all the stations at once but maybe the station you landed on is playing some really soft soothing music you're driving down the highway it's late at night maybe you're coming home from the airport and the incredibly comfortable seats at the rivero ease you into a slumber your eyes closed this is the situation where you want the photo nation DMS or driver monitoring system it'll step in and make some loud noises to wake you up so under the steering wheel we've got an IR camera that can tell the car if your eyes are open where they're looking and even take a guess at what your mood is now currently this just makes the car get mad when you look away from the road and plays a cheerful song if you look sad though in fairness they only started integrating this about four months ago but in the future this data is going to be crucial for self-driving vehicles so the DMS will give the car information during autonomous operation so if you fall asleep it can park on the side of the road or if it needs to hand over control to the driver from autonomous mode it can make sure the driver is actually looking at the road and isn't terrified before giving them control and the eye tracking and head position monitoring has another benefit that is implemented today a changeable fov backup camera so this allows for the rearview camera to naturally update where it's pointing based on where your head is in the car this would actually be beneficial in most cars I mean you really can see a lot using the system but in the rivero it really shines since the swoopy rear of this vehicle was clearly designed with looking cool in mind not rear visibility may be the most impressive part of all of these demos is that they've been implemented in just four weeks on completely automotive grade Hardware like if we saw this demo running on a tablet that would be pretty interesting but these are all real things that have been implemented that you can expect to start showing up in cars that you might be able to actually afford in 2020 so in the trunk first we've got power for everything twelve volt and five volt to run the electronics and the amp this black box here provides the connected radio and the processing is done by these SOC s from Texas Instruments and all of this can be pretty easily condensed down to a single chip like not a single board a single chip on that board giving automakers easy options for smarter cars in the future so thanks to DTS and photo nation for bringing our team out to this demo day you don't get many opportunities to drive around a luxury vehicle like this when well when you dress like us anyway thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or check out the link to where to buy the stuff we featured in the video description also in the description is our merch store so you too can look like us and our community forum which you should totally join