Car and Driver December 2013

Sic your dogs on us at: editors@caranddriver.com or join the discussion at: backfires.caranddriver.com THE NEWEST IN NEW One surefire way to tell when a manufacturer is at a loss to understand why sales are sub-par is when it comes out with a naming convention for all of its vehicles that is sure to confuse the market for years to come ["New Cars for 2014," September 2013].Congratulations, Infiniti! Instead of putting something useful in your new cars like ventilated seats in the new G … er, I mean Q50 that can now top $50,000, you have given it a name that reminds me of last year's big SUV. JIM SCHINDLER HOUSTON, TEXAS In your September issue I was surprised to see that you failed to mention that the Volvo V60 is being brought to the U.S.…

EDDIE ALTERMAN I CAN'T REMEMBER WHO TOLD ME THIS, more than a decade ago, but I'm sure it was someone smart. He said that what gave Japanese cars their bland competence, and what gave German cars their forceful personalities, was this: Japan's manufacturers strove for consistency and equilibrium in an attempt to satisfy the widest possible audience. Given 10 automotive attributes—styling, acceleration, braking, ride, etc.—a Toyota Camry would score a 7 of 10 in every category. A BMW 3-series, on the other hand, would be all over the place. It would post a 10 in handling, a 4 in rear-seat room, and a 2 in cup holders. These peaks and valleys were the key to a German car's spirit, a map of its priorities. Whereas the studied flattening of topographical variation…

E STREET BANDWAGON WIN, LOSE, OR DRAW — If successful, Formula E has the potential to accelerate EV development. Energy storage and motor efficiency could benefit. At the very least, the series will pioneer the use of a multigear transmission in an electric car. The upcoming electric-only RACE SERIES, called Formula E and governed by the FIA, promises all the thrill and glamour of a Formula 1 race without the head-hanging shame associated with the profligate burning of fossil fuels on a racetrack.* Like any other top-tier racing series, the stated goal is to use the open-wheelers as test beds for technology that might trickle into production cars. If a superior battery chemistry is going to make it to production, for example, it'll get tested here first. The series is set to…

CVTs are our LEAST FAVORITE type of transmission mainly because their only nod to driver involvement is engine drone under heavy throttle. In spite of the lost love, CVTs are making inroads against manuals and conventional automatics. Toyota, for example, has introduced a new belt-and-pulley transmission as standard equipment on three-quarters of its 2014 Corolla range. Slow-laners adore the CVT's lack of drama. Stick it in D, tap the gas, and trust the flux capacitor under the hood to do what's right. In the event these cruisers deign to pass one of their own, a nudge of the accelerator provides extra thrust with no hint of shift shock. Audi, Honda, Hyundai, Subaru, and Toyota all make their own CVTs. Nissan owns a controlling interest in JATCO, the firm that supplies 49 percent…

To a pig, the law of diminishing returns is a sobering inevitability. As an edible animal, it eventually crests that point when the rising cost of feeding it during growth outpaces its increasing value as food. A pig hits that point after less than a year. During those few months, the most it can hope for is to forage enough acorns to impart a lively nuttiness to a BLT (or, from the pig's perspective, a me-LT). However, if it happens to be a piglet born in Oregon, it might just hitch a ride at the Tillamook County Fair's Pig-N-Ford race, in which competitors race stripped-down Model Ts around a dirt oval while clutching pork that is still in ambulatory form. The formula has been the same since the first Pig-N-Ford race…

Collision-avoidance image processing tops the list of data-intensive in-vehicle applications, requiring 100 billion operations per second. A typical modern car contains more than three miles of copper wire weighing more than 150 pounds. ELECTRONIC CONTROL UNITS The average vehicle has approximately 25 ECUs A Chevrolet Malibu has about 40 A Cadillac XTS has about 80 The most advanced vehicles have more than 100 65 percent of in-car processors are either application-specific or 4- or 8-bit chips with less than 256 kB of memory, roughly equivalent to an Atari 2600 game console. 30 percent are 16- or 32-bit with up to 2 MB of memory, roughly equivalent to a Super Nintendo game console. 5 percent are 32-bit processors with 4 or more MB of memory, like the original Sony PlayStation. The most advanced of these even have multi-core processors similar to…