<b>Car Review</b>: 2015 Subaru Impreza 2.0i Limited 5-door | Driving |
- <b>Car Review</b>: 2015 Subaru Impreza 2.0i Limited 5-door | Driving
- Mercedes-Benz SL400: <b>car review</b> | Technology | The Guardian
- Drones and <b>Cars</b> Could Benefit from a Way to Shrink Radar <b>...</b>
- Citro?n DS3 DSport Plus THP 165 S&S 6-speed Manual ? <b>car review</b>
- Inexpensive Electric <b>Cars</b> May Arrive Sooner Than You Think
| <b>Car Review</b>: 2015 Subaru Impreza 2.0i Limited 5-door | Driving Posted: 08 Apr 2015 06:00 AM PDT Overview An all-weather AWD hatchback with a sensible interior and nice exterior styling Circumstances this winter gave me the opportunity to test drive the 2015 Subaru Impreza 2.0i 5-door hatchback twice. The first week was over the Christmas holidays when I realized my mother-in-law would be staying with us for a couple of days. She is 85 years old and her mobility has decreased, so getting her into my personal 2002 Ford F-150 RWD pickup truck was not a wise choice. The streets in the Plateau district Montreal where she lives are notoriously lined with snowbanks on the narrow streets, making the transportation of an elderly person even more risky. I, for one, certainly didn't want to spend my holidays in an overcrowded hospital ER waiting room. Subaru Canada lent me the Impreza and it suited my needs perfectly with its all-wheel-drive, ease of entry and plenty of cargo room with the hatchback for luggage, presents and food. My VIP passenger even liked the heated seats!  2015 Subaru Impreza 2.0i Limited 5-door Being the holidays, I didn't get to drive the Impreza as much as I usually do with a weekly test vehicle and I hoped I would get another chance to do a proper review. When the opportunity came up, I quickly booked it for a proper evaluation. Considering the ongoing depths of winter here in Montreal, it was still perfect Subaru weather. Even the snow lining the streets was still there! The thing I admire most about Subarus is their willingness to be different rather than mainstream copies of other marques. On the engineering side, the most obvious features are the boxer engines with their horizontally opposed cylinders and the symmetrical full-time AWD system. Subaru has stuck by these designs for decades and for good reason, they work very well. On the stylistic side of the coin, Subaru has been hot and cold with the pendulum of good taste thankfully swinging in the good direction with current models. I really like the current corporate face and the Impreza benefits from the rectangular grille and contoured multi-reflector Xenon High Intensity Discharge (HID) (low beam) with auto levelling headlights. It looks bold and a bit edgy for a touch of aggressiveness without being gimmicky. The test car came equipped with steering responsive fog lights (SRF) as part of the optional Technology Package ($1,200).  2015 Subaru Impreza 2.0i Limited 5-door There are two body styles to choose from, a four-door sedan and the five-door hatchback. My personal preference is for the latter, as I find the longer roofline gives the car a sleeker look especially in the side profile and you get the added benefit of more rear cargo space. The rear window on all hatch and SUVs does get dirty very quickly due to the aerodynamically induced low pressure area behind the vehicle but there is a small spoiler, with nicely integrated rear stoplight, and a washer/wiper combo to keep the view rearward somewhat clean. The interior of the Impreza was a slight letdown to me. It's not a problem with the overall design, which is clean, functional and ergonomic, but rather the tactile quality of the materials, which were primarily hard surfaces made of plastic. When I first got into the car, I thought to myself, "Oh, I have the base model this week," when in reality, this is the Limited model, top-of-the-line. Further along in the test period, I came to realize that Subaru may have been economical with the interior materials, but they did offer a lot of technology and safety features. The infotainment system included an AM/FM/CD/MP3/WMA audio system with a seven-inch high-resolution touchscreen display with GPS navigation system, STARLINK smartphone integration (including Aha radio), dual USB port/iPod control, auxiliary audio input and SMS text messaging capability. Besides the two main gauges on the instrument panel, there is an info display between the speedo and tachometer and a secondary display mounted high in the centre of the dashboard. There is driver-chosen sets of info available from fuel mileage to traction levels of the AWD system. This is all great, but for some reason, setting the main system to English left the secondary display stubbornly remaining French no matter how many times I tried to achieve linguistic harmony. Maybe it's a Canadian thing. Among the many safety features Subaru has built in, this model had the optional EyeSight advanced driver-assist system. This active safety system is like a second pair of eyes watching out for you, warning and even aiding your ability to avoid potential danger. Utilizing two cameras mounted high on the windshield to monitor activity in the road ahead, EyeSight provides four different types of preventative assistance to the driver when it is needed most. There is Adaptive Cruise Control, which can keep a constant distance behind traffic, Pre-Collision Braking if it senses an obstacle in front, Pre-collision Throttle Management will cut engine power if it detects a potentially hazardous object is in your way when starting from a stop, and Lane Departure & Sway Warning with a chime sound if your vehicle crosses a line without the turn indicator activated. In Subaru's latest TV commercial, it shows a car speeding toward a wall on a typical test track and it brakes safely to a stop before the expected crash. No, I did not attempt to recreate this test.  2015 Subaru Impreza 2.0i Limited 5-door This leads me to my final conclusions about Subaru, safety and technology in general. Subaru has garnered several awards for its advances in safety and this is, without doubt, a good thing. My personal experience in real-world circumstances proved to be annoying at times and the EyeSight system in particular causes me some concern. My week of driving saw an ever-changing, messy mix of road conditions typical of a Montreal winter reluctant to leave. There were bone-chilling temperatures and then sloppy roads with melting snow. The EyeSight and similar optical systems rely on a camera or two to see the lines on the road and obstacles. Dirty or snow-covered windshields or snow on the road reduces the camera's ability to "see" and the system will give false readings, no readings or even disable itself completely. These obstacle detection systems do work well for adaptive cruise control, but the engineers have added lane departure warning and "lead vehicle start assist," which is essentially your own car beeping at you when you fail to move soon enough instead of the impatient driver behind you laying on the horn. When driving through a curve such as a highway on-ramp, the Eyesight cameras would not always notice me cutting over the solid line on the inside of the corner. That is due to the limited angle of vision ahead of the car. Sometimes the system would mistake a strip of snow or salt as a line and beep at me. At other times, the system would shut off due to dirt, snow, etc. on the windshield, then maybe come back online. The EyeSight works well in straight lines and in good weather, but as a safety device, it is not reliable enough and drivers may come to depend on it.  2015 Subaru Impreza 2.0i Limited 5-door The Subaru Impreza's driving experience was good but not great. The Lineartronic CVT (Continuously Variable Transmission) suffered from the sensation of a slipping clutch, even in the sporty Manual Mode. The manual gearboxes and even the "regular" automatic transmissions of the past are a joy to drive. The boxer engine was quite smooth, but 148 horsepower is not much to work with, especially when the car is fully loaded with people and cargo. The AWD manages itself and is so good you forget about it. I love the built-in passive and active safety features like the "steel cage" surrounding the cabin, the always reliable AWD, the engine that slides under the floor in a collision, ABS brakes, blind-spot detection and so on, but I'll rely on the world's fastest adjusting ocular cameras ever made – human eyes – and the organic computer in my head that processes the information in the blink of an eye.  2015 Subaru Impreza 2.0i Limited 5-door The Specs Type of vehicle All-wheel-drive compact hatchback  |
| Mercedes-Benz SL400: <b>car review</b> | Technology | The Guardian Posted: 28 Mar 2015 10:00 PM PDT Blue-sky thinking: the Mercedes-Benz SL400 has a three-piece folding hard-top roof. Price £72,500 Rather amazingly the Mercedes-Benz SL400 is an entry-level model. It costs £72,500, which is almost three times the price of the average new car in Britain today (£28,973). However, it is still a good £10,000 cheaper than its near identical sister, the SL500 – the car which is one step above it in the Mercedes-Benz "pyramid of greatness", as Ron Swanson would say. The SL500 has a V8 rather than a V6 engine, and those two extra cylinders will vroooooom it to 62mph in 4.6 seconds rather than the slovenly 5.2 seconds of the V6. If time is money, that half-second could be the most expensive you ever buy. As the two cars are indistinguishable in all respects other than the size of their engines, opting for the "budget Benz" is also the fastest way you'll find to save money – £10k in 0.5 seconds. And that certainly beats stealing ketchup sachets, bathing with a friend or wearing a jumper. A Mercedes-Benz SL is the retirement present so many slave half their lives for. It's the car they dream of parking by the clubhouse so they can flash the gold Rolex as they duff another ball into the rough. But this car is far too good to waste driving to the golf club. Those magic letters, SL, derive from the German Sport Leicht, or Sport Lightweight, and they've been applied to sports cars built by Mercedes since 1954. The first model to carry the suffix (it's a prefix now) was the legendary gullwing 300SL – to many, the most beautiful sports car of all time. It had a steering wheel that pivoted to ease entry and bumpers were an optional extra. Since then, SL has applied to models spanning six design generations. The last of which is this, the SL400.  Inside story: the luxurious interior of the SL400. Owing to a pretty epic domestic admin cock-up (the inquiry into whether it was actually my fault or not has yet to be published), I had to drive from London to Salisbury and back, about 230 miles, after work, on a miserable Wednesday night. But such is the allure of the SL, I spent the whole day looking forward to it. I left at 8pm and got back after 1am, spending five hours pummelling through the dark in the company of a true knight of the road. Despite the chill and the dark and the drizzle, I kept the folding roof down (that's the law with convertibles). The Airscarf neck warmer (the car breathes warm air over your neck and shoulders – but not in a creepy way) and heated seats kept me toasty. This is a cruiser you can use all year round, and if you do decide to keep the roof up, its tinted glass panels can be darkened at the touch of a button. Other clever stuff includes the Magic Vision Control wipers which fire water out of the lip of the blade in both directions so no water is splashed on the windscreen – that loose spray may disrupt your visibility for a second or two. On the other hand it does mean you can't have fun squirting cyclists. The SL400 is fast and frugal – its twin-turbo 3-litre V6, paired with the seven-speed auto, churns out almost 37 miles to the gallon. It's smooth, elegant, enviable. They'd love this at the club… I really must start working on my swing.  Blazing saddles: are you ready for one of the most gripping rides of the year? To celebrate the screening of I, Superbiker V: Split Second on 30 March, Showcase Cinemas is giving you the chance to win a pair of VIP full-hospitality passes to this year's British Superbike Championship. The prize includes spending the day with the GB Moto team, with free food and drinks all day. The Championship rounds take place across the country kicking off at Donnington Park on 4 April and culminating in a high-speed finale on 16 October. To enter please answer the question below and send your answer to martin.love@observer.co.uk by 5pm on Monday 30 March (terms and conditions available on request): Who is the reigning 2014 British Superbike Champion competing this year? Book your tickets to I, Superbiker V here: showcasecinemas.co.uk Email Martin at martin.love@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @MartinLove166 Follow the Observer Magazine on Twitter @ObsMagazine |
| Drones and <b>Cars</b> Could Benefit from a Way to Shrink Radar <b>...</b> Posted: 05 Apr 2015 09:00 PM PDT Powerful radar, mostly limited to the military, could soon be cheap enough for cars and consumer drones to use.  This sheet of cheap "metamaterial" can be used to steer radar beams around. Plenty of people play with small drone aircraft in their backyards these days. Tom Driscoll, cofounder and chief technology officer of a startup called Echodyne may be the only one whose quadcopter packs the kind of sophisticated radar used on fighter jets. "We flew it around, did some collision avoidance, and locked onto one of our engineers and followed him around my backyard," says Driscoll. Radar instruments that can be used that way are normally bulky and extremely expensive. Echodyne is working on a device that is compact and cheap enough to be used widely. Radar systems work by sending out radio waves and using the echoes that bounce back to create an image of an object. Some radar systems use electronics to actively steer their outgoing radio waves, instead of just mechanically sweeping a beam in a fixed pattern. This lets them simultaneously scan the sky for objects and track specific ones with high accuracy. But the complex devices normally needed to steer radio waves around, known as phase shifters, make such electronically scanning radar expensive and bulky. Driscoll's drone carries an electronically scanning radar instrument that doesn't have a conventional phase shifter. The outgoing radio waves are steered with a much simpler device, built using techniques borrowed from a relatively new area of research on what are known as metamaterials.  This drone has an advanced electronically scanning radar on board, equipment usually much too bulky and expensive for such small craft. Metamaterials provide a way to get around many of the physical limitations that have previously defined how engineers could control radio, light, and sound waves. For example, while conventional lenses need their characteristic shape to bend light rays into focus, a metamaterial lens can bend light the same way while being perfectly flat. Metamaterials are made from repeating structures that are smaller than the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation being manipulated. Echodyne makes its metamaterials by tracing out repeating patterns of copper wiring on an ordinary circuit board. A board with multiple layers of such wiring can direct radar beams. And applying different voltages to some parts of the wiring makes it possible to actively control the beam as a phase shifter would. "Any printed circuit board manufacturer could produce these," says Driscoll. The radar systems used by the military typically start at around $100,000, says Eben Frankenberg, CEO and another cofounder of Echodyne. He says his company hopes to mass produce compact radar systems that cost only hundreds or thousands of dollars. Driscoll says that could make scanning radar become a standard sensor for vehicles and robots. Some prototype autonomous cars, including Google's, use spinning laser sensors to watch the world around them in 3-D. That technique can map the world in very high resolution, but its range decreases in fog or snow. Radar doesn't have that limitation, says Driscoll. Echodyne also plans to offer its systems to the military, and to replace the radar already in use commercially: the spinning dishes seen on ferries and other boats that create simple maps by sweeping a beam around, for example, or the small fixed sensors in some cars that allow an adaptive cruise control system to keep a safe distance from the car ahead. Echodyne was created by the patent licensing company Intellectual Ventures. In 2013, Intellectual Ventures set up a unit dedicated to building a portfolio of patents for metamaterials, and to figuring out how to commercialize them. Echodyne has also received investment funding from Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, and venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group. David Smith, a professor at Duke University who researches metamaterials and has worked with Intellectual Ventures, says that Echodyne's approach provides very flexible ways to control radio waves. The company's biggest challenge, he says, is to craft complete radar systems that can compete in the market. That means matching the performance of very high-end systems used by the military today to succeed in the defense market, and carefully controlling costs for applications in the car industry. |
| Citro?n DS3 DSport Plus THP 165 S&S 6-speed Manual ? <b>car review</b> Posted: 03 Apr 2015 10:00 PM PDT 'This little Citroën DS3 is as sound as a pound; it is as fit as a flea.' Photograph: Simon Stuart-Miller for the Guardian 'As a driver, you have to like it, for the sheer livability, even pleasure, of long-distance travel." On a motorway, phrases like this kept floating into my head, the sort that don't convey very much except satisfaction. This little Citroën DS3 is as sound as a pound; it is as fit as a flea. It loves the top speeds and could drive all day; the cabin, being leather-bedecked and roomier at the front, is ergonomic enough that I could, too. In an acceleration scenario, it will never let you down. The gear switches from third up are all smooth, smooth, smooth, but fifth to sixth is particularly battle-ready. It is eye-catching in a sweet, unassuming way, and mine was the exact colour of the blue nail varnish devised to coincide with the Cinderella movie. The fuel economy is better in the diesel version, but an official mpg of 50 or thereabouts (combined) in this petrol one is typically thrifty for the make – impressive for a model so sporty. Life was not perfect on my odyssey across the UK. The satnav is a bit sluggish, enough to get you on to the M6 toll instead of the M42. The fuel gauge is melodramatic, and tells you you're low on fuel about once every 30 seconds. Put two big teenagers in the back and you feel as if you're in a joke about some elephants and a telephone box. But as a driver, you have to like it, for the pleasure of long-distance travel, as I was saying. I did not feel the same way in town. It has quite a high biting point. As soon as I'd written that down, I minded it less, the way bitching about a loved one by email makes you forgive them. But in stop-start traffic, it's hard on your extensor tendons. (You'll know what those are if you persistently kick things to the point of self-injury.) I revved a lot, at the start: this is supposed to be enjoyable and make you think of a tiger in your tank. It sounded as if someone was killing a tiger with a bandsaw in mine. Second gear is not good for much, whiny and easily exhausted, like a crap dad in a Jane Austen novel. You could go a lot greener, even within the DS3 range – you're paying a lot of planet for your 0 to 62 acceleration. If you were prepared to push it from seven seconds to nine, you could get under 100g/km. But let's say you're very important, and in a tremendous hurry for a really good reason, you can still hold your head high-ish. It's a cute car, for cute people, in acute scenarios. @zoesqwilliams  Citroen detail Price from £19,000 (as tested £20,295) • Follow Zoe on Twitter |
| Inexpensive Electric <b>Cars</b> May Arrive Sooner Than You Think Posted: 02 Apr 2015 11:52 AM PDT A new study suggests that battery-powered vehicles are close to being cost-effective for most people. Electric cars may seem like a niche product that only wealthy people can afford, but a new analysis suggests that they may be close to competing with or even beating gas cars on cost. The true cost of lithium-ion batteries in electric cars is a secret closely held by manufacturers. And estimates of the cost vary widely, making it tough to determine just how much lower they must go before electric vehicles with long ranges can be affordable for most buyers. But a peer-reviewed study of more than 80 estimates reported between 2007 and 2014 determined that the costs of battery packs are "much lower" than widely assumed by energy-policy analysts. The authors of the new study concluded that the battery packs used by market-leading EV manufacturers like Tesla and Nissan cost as little as $300 per kilowatt-hour of energy in 2014. That's lower than the most optimistic published projections for 2015, and even below the average published projection for 2020. The authors found that batteries appear on track to reach $230 per kilowatt-hour by 2018. If that's true, it would push EVs across a meaningful threshold. Depending on the price of gas, the sticker price of an EV is expected to appeal to many more people if its battery costs between $125 and $300 per kilowatt-hour. Because the battery makes up perhaps a quarter to a half of the cost of the car, a substantially cheaper battery would make the vehicle itself significantly cheaper too. Alternatively, carmakers could maintain current EV prices but offer vehicles with much longer ranges. The range would likely be crucial for many buyers because it's so much cheaper to "fill" an EV with electricity—charging a car with a 300-mile range could cost less than $10. Given the disparity in gasoline and electricity prices, the study's authors, Bjӧrn Nykvist and Måns Nilsson, research fellows at the Stockholm Environment Institute, say that if batteries fall as low as $150 per kilowatt-hour, this could lead to "a potential paradigm shift in vehicle technology." The analysis suggests that the cost of packs used by the leading EV manufacturers is falling about 8 percent a year. Although Nykvist acknowledges that "the uncertainties are large," he says it's realistic to think that this rate of decline could continue in the coming years, thanks to the economies of scale that would be created if large manufacturers like Nissan and Tesla follow through with their separate plans to massively increase production. The speed at which the cost appears to be falling is similar to the rate that was seen with the nickel metal hydride battery technology used in hybrids like the Toyota Prius, he says. Nykvist and Nilsson relied on estimates from a variety of sources: public statements by EV manufacturers, peer-reviewed literature, news reports (including from MIT Technology Review), and so-called gray literature, or research papers published by governments, businesses, and academics. Luis Munuera, an energy analyst for the International Energy Agency, and Pierpaolo Cazzola, a transport policy analyst for the same agency, caution in an e-mail to MIT Technology Review that the cost reductions implied in the new analysis "should be taken with care," since battery cost figures from disparate sources are often not directly comparable. Further, they point out, the degree to which cost decline trends for energy technologies can be extrapolated into the future is unclear. Still, they admit, "we have seen events moving quicker than expected in lithium-ion battery technology." Gain the insight you need on emerging technologies at EmTech Digital. Register today  |
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