Gadgetory

this episode of TechnoBuffalo is brought to you by harry's what's up everyone john wrench from TechnoBuffalo here that beast behind me is a 2014 cadillac ELR putting through its paces for the better part of a week and I want to share everything about this car the good and the bad let's go ahead and take a look at this plug-in hybrid so looking at the Cadillac ELR you think it's maybe makes better sense to have it on the Nurburgring it looks like a successor to the cts coupe as opposed to what it really is which is a variance of the Volt's so it's a very interesting car so first it was unveiled at the 2009 North American Motor Show based on the converge concept and it kept pretty true to what the concept looked like it's absolutely gorgeous from the 20 inch wheels pushed out to the corners the jeweled LED headlights the fins on the back that harken back to Cadillacs of yesteryear to the gigantic two doors on this coupe it is absolutely stunning it is technically a four-seater he only put the other two people in the back if you really hate them there is no room at all this whole beautiful package starts at $76,000 ours is loaded up to well over 80,000 so this is not a car for the faint of heart or those light on the wallet so what are you gonna get for your $80,000 one thing you're not gonna get is any sort of hydraulic lift for the hood that's just an old-school metal bar that props up the hood powering this guy there's a lot of stuff going on here so it's a plug-in hybrid not a plug-in hybrid like you've seen before what this does is it uses the gas powered engine to actually put electricity back into the battery not really connected to the wheels at all so think of it as just a generator so what it is it's taken straight from the Chevy Volt it's a 1.4 liter four-cylinder gas powered electric generator it does take premium gas there was a big caveat that's gonna power the 16 point 5 kilowatt hour battery so those two combined are good for 181 horsepower and a whopping 295 foot-pounds of torque of course being an electric vehicle it's crazy torque II think of it like an electric drill so you push that trigger it's spinning at full speed same thing here you get max torque from really one rpm as soon as that car moves so this thing gets out of its own way pretty quickly it's gonna have to move though a 4050 pound car so it's gonna get from 0 to 60 eventually in 7.9 with an electric car the zero to 30s we get a lot of the fun and much more of the speed so with all this electric and hybrid technology it's gonna be good for 82 MPGe when you're running on gas it's gonna be equivalent of 31 to 33 miles per gallon if you combine the two the gas and the electric so a full tank of gas and a full charge to be able to drive about 345 miles forgot to refill that 16.5 kilowatt hour pack it's gonna take four to five hours on a level to 240 volt charger so Cadillac for the past few years has really been known for technology and there is a ton at cran it's the cabin of the L R so I'm a bit useful if some of it's just tech for tech sake look at these cupholders it's got a power retracting door I don't know what it would cost to replace that motor but I'm wagering it's not going to be cheap you got a ton of hidden compartments here if that wasn't enough for you let's say you want to hide your sunglasses somewhere or something else go ahead and tap that it's gonna pop right up grab your glasses and you are good to go put the sucker right on down look at this car you'll notice that there are no knobs at all it's very very sleek everything here is all electronic if you look at this main system here it is Cadillac Q which has haptic feedback that means as you touch it it gives a little bit of vibration let's know you hit something we talked to you launched a few years ago and was a bit of a convoluted to use Q in this iteration that was actually pretty intuitive as a fun side note my mother-in-law who's not so tech savvy drives an SRX she doesn't had a youth Q on her own very easily so Cadillac claims it worked very similar to a tablet so looking at the screen right now there's not much information information right there but it does have a bit of a proximity sensor so as I bring my hand close to it you'll see information starts to pop up it looks cool why can't I have information the way I'm driving all the time once you have it up here though it's very easy to navigate ripping across the tops and to get you to the main functions you've got of course your radio I've got phone we've got GPS which is quite nice this is real GPS it's not based on OnStar all your climate control and then if you want to Benten see sort of your driving information how the battery is getting used in my opinion one of the coolest features though of Q is in the audio setting you can pause audio so let's say you're listening to Howard Stern you don't want to miss Robins news but your mom calls you go ahead and pause that and pick it right up later and scrub through commercials let's get to where you want to go it's a really neat feature and I'm really happy to see it standard with Q so like the volt the ELR has four main drive modes the first one that you're gonna be in most is gonna be tour that's sort of your general driving it's optimized for mpg and performance kind of tries to find that happy medium point the next one that you've got is sport and that's obviously what it says it's gonna drain the battery much quicker you're gonna get more electrons coming out it's gonna work that inverter a little bit more to get as much power and performance as you can of the car you'll see about a twenty to twenty five percent drop in electric range Oh me drop into that one next is going to be Mountain and you're gonna use Mountain when you want to conserve the battery and put as much electric juice as you can into it so it's gonna burn them more gas to put electric power back in it figures that you're going up a big hill and you're going to want that extra power and the last one that we've got is hold mode not just essentially turns it into kind of an a regular internal combustion engine it's saved as a battery so that's to say it's constantly generating power to keep a constant level of charge inside of that battery so driving it in TOR which is the main mode are going to be at most of the time it's surprisingly a pretty stiff suspension it feels almost sports tuned so you're gonna feel the bumps in the road not so much that it's like you're driving a huge pickup truck or something it definitely feels more along the suspension of a BMW 3-series where you serve you feel what your going over but you're not sort of rattling into your jaw a wall you're driving and because it's electric you've got a completely linear power curve at least when you've got a fully charged battery so when you step on it you really start to move something I really enjoyed with the car so big an electric car it's got regenerative braking but they've done regenerate braking a little bit different let me explain quickly if you don't know what general braking is a new traditional internal combustion car when you brake the calipers condensed down you're gonna have heat and that heat is usually just lost its kinetic energy what regenerative braking does that we captures that kinetic energy puts it back into the battery pack most cars most electric cars are at the Tesla Model S have a really aggressive region so you take your foot off of the accelerator pedal like I can't say gas here it's gonna almost slow the car down similar to down down a manual transmission and all the energy is gonna go back into the car the ELR star takes a bit of a different approach when you take your foot off of the accelerator pedal it could've focuses on coasting and coasting uses no electricity whatsoever sort of optimize your range but it does have a light regen if you want a more aggressive regen you could drop the stock down into L and L is gonna give you that more traditional electric car type region but that's not the only way to do it here calyx something really interesting on the e a lot and they listen to one of complaints and feedback people have the volts and they added paddles and you see these paddles usually on this side and regular cars and you can up shift or down shift gears but you know really no gears you're an electric car what this is gonna do on both pedals of the same tiles are the same thing when you push it in it activates your regenerative braking so you get regen on demand so you can keep it in your normal Drive mode push that in you can sort of slow yourself down and you could really feel it's a very sort of jarring stop so you can almost do one pedal driving it's a really neat implementation that I've never seen the paddles before and that got used to it in about two days and I kind of liked having it I do a show like all paddles that are mounted to the stock and not the wheel itself so they're kind of hard to find if you're turning but that's a really small gripe also plastic pedals on an $80,000 car like the more premium material there but that's a small grade slow meter up to this awesome car video for just one second listen I'm online I get called a lot of things online I could call the guy dumb face people tell me I look fat you've gained weight people say I'm dumb know what I'm talking about on people call me an Apple fanboy call me an Android fanboy but hurts me the most right here my heart is when they call me a hairy beast because I hate to shave and it's true I hate to shave so let me tell you about our friends at Harry's which is a pain to go buy razors you got a car go store ask the people Harry's makes it super easy deliver really really quality products Harris's chemical company they're new they're less than one year old and they're already doing super disruptive stuff in the shaving industry they're offering a better shaving experience a better value than the big old Giants I'm not gonna mention their names they rhyme with flick and filete the company makes awesome german-engineered blades and they care so much about the quality of the shave they actually just purchase the 93 year old German Factory that actually makes them which is kind of cool check them out go to harrys.com and use promo code techno to say 5 bucks off your first purchase 15 bucks they can get you a set that includes a handle three blades shave cream shipped right to your door Harry's even offers a custom engraving option to engrave your initials right on the razor so everybody knows that is your razor so your wife girlfriends has no excuse to use your razor BIC no no it's got my name on it you should should know that again check them out at Harry's com the car is really quiet especially when you're using the battery that's true with most electric cars or Cadillac did a great job dampening all outside wind noise which is not true with most electric cars so when you've got this running an electric and you got the windows up and you've got the a/c turned off you really don't hear that much noise that does change though completely when that internal combustion and starts kicking on and you get rattles you can hear the engine whirl and grind you can almost feel the Pistons pumping up and down tell most feel vibrations up your arm as well it's two totally different driving experiences here so what's the verdict on the ELR on its own it's really fun to drive enjoyable car and I'd like to driving it but I cannot recommend it due solely to the price look at it this way a volt start to 34,000 dollars maybe you can get two nicely option volt for less what this is gonna cost BMW 6 Series starts $76,000 it's a good 60 kilowatt Model S start to $69,000 Porsche Panamera starts the same price and the list goes on and on the math on this car just doesn't add up I'm not really sure what Cadillac made this car to compete with the now-defunct Fisker Karma if you decide that money is not a factor for you you'll be left with a very competent enjoyable car to drive that's also really good-looking but forgot 8,000 dollars to spend on a car you might want to see what else is available thank you guys for watching if you like what you saw please subscribe they'll be the first ones to know when new videos come up we have a ton of stuff we do unboxing to do hands-on reviews cars and everything in between the Nets do consumer electronics we'd love to have you stick around