JSwain

Thursday, October 1, 2015

Subaru Forester 2.0XT – Instrumented Test

2016 Subaru Forester 2.0XT Touring turbocharged 2.0-liter flat-4 engine

Honda Reveals Production-Ready FCV Fuel-Cell Vehicle

Global debut of Honda’s all new FCV vehicle

Presaged by two concept cars, the imaginatively named FCEV Concept and the FCV Concept, Honda’s new hydrogen-fuel-cell sedan has now been shown in production form, ahead of its in-the-flesh debut at the Tokyo auto show.

Still (tentatively) called the FCV, the hydrogen-powered Honda’s appearance hasn’t strayed far from the FCV Concept (below) that the company rolled out last January at Detroit.

Honda FCV Concept

Honda FCV Concept, from Detroit 2015.

The real car—the red one—has a less exotic front end, with a more traditional grille. It also sprouts door handles (very practical), an arc-shaped piece of chrome that follows the roofline, and redesigned front fender vents. The greenhouse takes on more of a Crosstour-like shape, which is a little unfortunate.

Honda FCEV concept

Honda FCEV Concept, the first in the series.

Honda says the production car will offer a cruising range of more than 435 miles, but that’s for the Japanese market, which has a different test cycle than we do. For us, it will be closer to the 300 miles that Honda was talking at the time of the FCV Concept. The company also boasts that it was able to package all the powertrain components outside of the passenger compartment, allowing the FCV to seat five.

Further details are scarce. Will the FCV be available for lease only, like the FCX Clarity was? Or will buyers be able to purchase one, as they can with the fuel-cell-powered Toyota Mirai? Hopefully, we’ll learn more once the FCV makes its official debut at Tokyo and before it arrives on our shores in 2016.

Selfish Whims: We Go For a Ride in Google’s Self-Driving Car

The self-driving car is a proposition too enticing for society at large to ignore. Lotus 7 enthusiast and new CEO of Google’s self-driving-car project John Krafcik sees it as the way forward, citing the need to sell on safety. But Krafcik didn’t say much else at the presentation following our ride in the tech giant’s autonomous vehicle, leaving it to the folks who’d been working on the program since it began in 2009. In his own words, “You don’t have to listen to me talk hardly at all.”

Built by Roush in Livonia, Michigan, Google’s wee nugget of a thing reminds us more of college-student-proof furniture than an actual vehicle, right down to the teal plastic accents in the interior. They’re a nigh-exact color match to the trim at UC Santa Cruz’s College Eight circa 1993, a throwback to the era before Google existed, when tech-savvy students were using text-based browsers and UCSC’s Infoslug gopher to wiggle their way around the internet. When the World Wide Web was just another thing you could log onto. When Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still Stanford undergrads.

Google Self-Driving Car

Twenty-odd years later, this hat-shaped thing rolls up to us in the rooftop parking lot of one of Google’s Mountain View, California buildings. The coupe-length door opens via a pillar-mounted handle. The sheer size of the portal makes ingress a breeze. Once inside, we’re greeted with an expansive, slightly distorted view via a flexible, pedestrian-impact-friendly windshield. The whole thing feels a bit like a Renault Twizy reimagined as a side-by-side.

Where the steering wheel, dash, and pedals would be, there’s simply a bin with a screen mounted over it, showing an approximation of what the car sees, largely gleaned from its laser-scanning sensors. On the center console, there’s an emergency-stop switch shrouded by a clear plastic cover, controls for seat heaters, some buttons featuring people wearing headsets that the Google folks wouldn’t explain, and a black, backlit button proclaiming, “GO.”

Google Self-Driving Car

We mashed “GO,” the car responded with a brief countdown, and off we went around the parking lot, whirring like a tiny BART train—at speeds below 25 mph. As such, any estimated skidpad numbers, zero-to-60 figures, and other performance prognostications are rendered wholly baseless, so we won’t make them. What was interesting and frankly impressive was exactly how surefooted the system felt. Mercedes-Benz’s Distronic Plus with Steering Assist, perhaps the best self-driving system on sale today, feels positively primitive, tentative, and sketchy compared to the authority with which GumNut the Koala Car goes about its business.

Google Self-Driving Car

A man on a bicycle with a Rastafarian paint scheme shoots out from nowhere and the smartypants runabout slows its roll smoothly and surely, system unfazed by the two-wheeled miscreant. Its behavior is the result of 1.2 million miles traveled by the company’s autonomous fleet, a group of vehicles that continues to amass about 15,000 miles’ worth of data every week. And while your average C/D reader may log more miles than that over the course of a year, Joe Schmuck Commuter very likely doesn’t. The company points out that over the life of the program so far, it has amassed 90 years’ worth of driving experience. And unlike a 106-year-old driver, its servers’ reaction times are only getting faster.

Google Self-Driving Car

Our recent ride in Mercedes-Benz’s F 015 Luxury in Motion concept left us suspicious that a nearby blacked-out Sprinter hid a pack of Swabians huddled over a console, controlling the car’s movements. If there was a cadre of Google-ites joysticking this wheeled Pikachu to and fro, we’d be surprised. We’re pretty sure little GumNut was acting pretty much on its own, save its mandate to follow a pre-planned route with defined start and stop points.

Google Self-Driving Car

Before our ride in the prototype, we went for a spin on city streets in one of Google’s Lexus RX development vehicles. The utes are piloted by two-person teams, with one manning the controls and the other observing what the car “sees” on a laptop. And if the Lexus wasn’t quite as smooth as the Koalamobile, it was also faced with more demanding tasks, navigating neighborhoods, intersections, and other vehicles—vehicles driven by erratic, imperfect humans.

Part of the reason Google’s machines are so good—beyond the miles logged—is that they’re running on roads the company has mapped in great detail. Beyond the simple routes available in your phone’s Google Maps app, the highways and byways around the Bay Area have been intimately recorded, with information about curbs, islands, and even the road’s crown made available to the car, allowing it to predict a course, then modify it as it receives input from the sensor suite. In addition to GPS, the cars also feature an inertial navigation system with gyroscopes and accelerometers like you’d find in a plane or a submarine, allowing the car to pinpoint its location in concrete jungles and in tunnels, where GPS signals can be notoriously unreliable.

So is this little widget of an automatic automobile the future? Yes and no. It’s patently silly to think that self-driving vehicles aren’t inevitable. The potential societal benefits are too great. Meanwhile, Google has gone on record that it doesn’t want to be in the car business; we expect the company to fall into the Tier 1 supplier realm, designing systems for automakers to install in their own vehicles.

The overarching question about all this is “when?” As of yet, nobody has a definitive answer, although the Self-Driving Car Project’s director, Chris Urmson, says he’d like to see it on the roads in four years, so his now-twelve-year-old son doesn’t have to get a driver’s license when he turns sixteen. We’d be lying if that statement didn’t make our hearts sink.

Certainly, Google’s tech makes the mildly autonomous systems on sale today seem patently rudimentary in function. But we do have one request: Whatever the brave (or pusillanimous) autonomous future holds for us, might we spec it with less teal Tupperware, please?

Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Recall Alert: 2015 Ford Taurus and Lincoln MKS, 2016 Ford Explorer

Vehicles Affected: Approximately 200 model-year 2015 Ford Taurus and Lincoln MKS sedans as well as model-year 2016 Ford Explorer SUVs. Only vehicles built at the Chicago Assembly Plant on July 24, 2015, are affected.

The Problem: In the affected vehicles, the fuel tank attachment bolts might not have been tightened properly. This could lead to a fuel leak, increasing the risk of a fire. The automaker is not aware of any accidents, injuries or fires associated with this issue.

The Fix: Dealers will properly tighten the fuel tank attachment bolts for free.

What Owners Should Do: Ford has not yet released an owner notification schedule. Owners can call Ford at 866-436-7332 for more information.

Need to Find a Dealer for Service? Go to Cars.com Service & Repair to find your local dealer.

More Recalls

2016 BMW X4 M40i Launched: Because Why Not?

-BMW’s M Performance lineup is growing, most recently with the addition of the X4 M40i, which targets the Audi SQ5 and the upcoming Mercedes-Benz GLC450 AMG. Unlike those two, however, the BMW is based on a “crossover coupe”—and based on its specs and appearance, it might well be the sportiest SUV in its size class.

Being an M Performance model, the X4 M40i has been tweaked by the company’s M GmbH performance gurus. It’s powered by an upgraded version of the X4 35i’s N55 inline six, rated here at 355 horsepower and 343 lb-ft of torque. That’s an increase of 55 horsepower and 43 lb-ft, and it translates into a factory-estimated zero-to-60-mph sprint of just 4.7 seconds, down from 5.2 seconds for the 35i. Top speed is governed at 130 mph, but it can be increased to 150 mph.

The X4 M40i rolls on 245/45 front and 275/40 rear rubber on 19-inch wheels; it can also be specified with 245/40 and 275/35 tires on 20-inch wheels. The suspension has increased front camber as well as stiffer springs and antiroll bars. The steering is modified, as well. All-wheel drive is standard.

We were impressed by the performance of the regular X4 35i. And there’s a good possibility the 40i will serve as a segment benchmark when it appears in early 2016.

Recall Alert: 1998-2003 Ford Windstar

Vehicles Affected: Approximately 283,000 model-year 1998-2003 Ford Windstar minivans manufactured between Sept. 2, 1997, and July 3, 2003, at the Oakville Assembly Plant in Ontario, all of which received rear axle reinforcement brackets during a previous recall action

The Problem: The combined effects of corrosion and stress can lead to cracks in the axle, which if undetected can grow and result in a complete fracture. A previous recall repair of these vehicles included the installation of a rear axle reinforcement bracket. An incorrectly installed bracket could limit the effectiveness of that repair. Ford said it is aware of a "small number of accidents that might be connected to this issue, but no injuries."

The Fix: Dealers will inspect the brackets to determine if they were correctly installed, and the automaker will install a new axle on vehicles that have the incorrectly installed bracket, for free; owners of vehicles with the correctly installed bracket will receive an incentive to replace their rear axle at a reduced cost; the offer is good for one year with unlimited mileage.

What Owners Should Do: Ford did not immediately announce an owner-notification schedule. Owners can call the automaker at 866-436-7332 for more info.

Need to Find a Dealer for Service? Go to Cars.com Service & Repair to find your local dealer.

More Recalls