Road Reality » Sirius

Test Drives in the 21st Century

John Suit — Mon, 03 May 2010 15:03:56 +0000

SYNC Home Screen

When asked for advice on test driving a new car, most people will reply that you should take it on the highway, sit in some traffic, drive over some bumps, and of course play with the radio. They’re basically telling you to test the car out on a variety of road surfaces and traffic conditions, to make sure it’s comfortable and drives the way you want it to. Given the sophisticated electronics in today’s automobiles, let’s add another few things to the list:

Review the window sticker, looking for any tech-related items
Go through each of those items and test them as much as you can
Make sure to ask the salesperson about each of the tech features on the car, and make sure he or she shows you how they work

Click past the jump for the why and the how.

On today’s cars, some of the tech features may not be readily apparent, so make sure you read through the whole window sticker on a car you’re interested in buying. Then, sit in the driver’s seat and play with those features. Go through all of them, to make sure they work properly. More importantly, make sure they work the way you’d expect them to. If pushing a button doesn’t give you the desired response, ask your salesperson about it. This is especially important if you’re not familiar with the technology.

As part of testing the technology, if the car is equipped with navigation, go ahead and take the time to figure it out, entering (and driving to) a couple of destinations. While driving to those destinations, pay attention to how the navigation is working, whether or not it’s doing things the way you expect them to, and that it is timely in its recalculating. Take a wrong turn on purpose to see how the navigation system reacts. Don’t put your home address in the test car’s navigation, but if you do, make sure you delete it before returning to the dealership.

Another popular tech feature is Bluetooth hands-free telephony. This connects your cell phone to the car so that you can make and answer calls without taking your hands or eyes off of the road. The salesperson should be able to help you “pair” your phone with the car, allowing you to test it. Make and receive at least a couple of calls, checking for static or other noises in the audio, for volume, and for ease-of-use. Some cars’ systems work better with certain phones, which is why this is a good test. As part of the Bluetooth features is Bluetooth audio, where your Bluetooth-enabled MP3 player can play its audio through your car’s speakers, wirelessly. Again, this is a job for your salesperson, but you’re checking for audio quality and making sure the system is easy to use.

Besides Bluetooth and navigation, some cars offer XM NavTraffic traffic updates (and the equivalent Sirius feature), weather updates, and traffic routing. The former two are easy to test, especially if you’re already testing the navigation features. Just get on the highway and the traffic update system should alert you to incidents along your route or nearby. The weather should be on its own screen, another easy test. Harder to test is the traffic routing, but if you’re getting traffic updates, chances are that the navigation system will also try to route you around the traffic incidents between you and your destination.

It’s been around longer than some of the other features mentioned, but iPod/MP3 player integration is becoming ubiquitous these days, so I figured I would spend some time talking about it. By far, the most popular is iPod integration, which also sets the system up to work with USB thumb drives and external hard drives. Yes, you generally can use an external hard drive or thumb drive in your car! When providing the USB port for you to plug in your iPod’s dock connector, the tech guys at an automaker usually make sure you can plug in a multitude of devices, and the car will recognize them. You should bring whatever music-holding device you plan on using while driving, to the test drive. This allows you to get a really good grip on the features of your possible new car, and make sure there are no surprises if you buy the car.

Other good tech-related items to check on include (but are not limited to) heated/cooled seats, heated steering wheels, adaptive headlights which swivel left and right with the steering wheel, power sun shades, dual-panel moonroofs, automatic headlights, automatic high beams, self-parking systems and blind spot awareness systems.

Post your questions and comments below on tech items you’ve found in cars and what your test drive experiences were like!

by John Suit

New-Car Pricing: 2011 Volvo C70 Retractable Hardtop

John Suit — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:00:23 +0000

Volvo’s hardtop convertible, the 2011 C70, will be costing buyers a minimum of $39,950 ($40,800 with $850 destination charge) when it goes on sale later this year. According to Volvo, the new base price is a savings of $4,000 over similarly-equipped 2010 C70s, with more standard features, such as leather seating and SIRIUS satellite radio. With a slightly-redesigned exterior, and new materials (especially leather, called “Sovereign Hides”) used to create the interior, the C70 presents a compelling option for lovers of convertibles who want the quiet of a coupe (with the top up, of course), and don’t want to spend a ton of money.

by John Suit

Source: Volvo

Car Tech: Ford/Microsoft SYNC

roadreality — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:51:21 +0000

To some, the names Ford and Microsoft make people cringe. Those of you who remember the Pinto, and more recently the Explorer/Firestone fiasco, may not trust Ford. Windows Vista was enough to give Apple an almost 10% market share in the world of personal computers. In the past few years though, Ford has spent a lot of time, money and energy in order to make its cars competitive with domestic and foreign rivals. One of the things they needed to accomplish was increasing the amount of technology in the vehicles they manufactured. Starting in 2008, Ford offered a technology called SYNC, which they developed in cooperation with Microsoft. SYNC is a voice-activated in-car communications system. It integrates into the radio, phone, climate control and optional navigation systems. It allows the driver to control most in-car features, which normally would require looking away from the road. After the jump, we’ll jump in and take a look at its features.

SYNC has a lot going on. It’s bundled with Bluetooth hands-free technology for your cell phone, the radio, navigation system (when equipped) and the climate control (when equipped with automatic climate control), as I mentioned before, but how does it accomplish each of those tasks? Ford adds buttons to the steering wheel, which when pushed, activate certain features of the system, mainly the voice activation features, volume and seek buttons. The big one of those three is the voice activation. For years, Microsoft has worked on voice recognition. Teamed up with an easy-to-use interface, the SYNC system uses your voice to command the system to change stations, system parameters, and set your destination. My own personal vehicle is a 2009 Lincoln MKS, which features the SYNC system and navigation. If you get a Ford product without the navigation system, some of the features will be unavailable or different, so keep that in mind. Ford provides a very detailed instruction manual for the SYNC system in each of its vehicles.

The first thing you’ll want to do when you first get the SYNC system is to pair your cell phone. The SyncMyRide web site lists phones which have been tested to be compatible with SYNC. Pairing the phone is the only step you have to complete in order to activate the entire system. The built-in GPS will find out where you are, and the radio station will be set to its default station. The SYNC system in the Lincoln vehicles comes with Sirius radio. On other vehicles, it may be optional. The standard option packages on Ford vehicles will bundle the SYNC with Sirius radio and sometimes navigation as well.

Getting used to the SYNC system is quite easy, especially compared to competing systems in BMW and Mercedes-Benz vehicles. Theirs have gotten easier to use with each passing year, but they still don’t have the simplicity of SYNC’s user interface. The touch screen in Ford, Lincoln and Mercury vehicles is big, so it displays a lot of information, allowing you to view the navigation, radio and climate control overviews. Touching any of the three portions of the screen takes you to a more detailed display based on the selected subsystem. Only in rare instances does the SYNC system require you to push a physical button, so almost of the things you’ll want to do with SYNC can be done by touching the 8″ touch screen. The visual and aural feedback the system gives you lets you know that the system got your command. While driving, you can use the Voice button on the steering wheel to change stations, set your destination, among a littany of other commands SYNC is preprogrammed for, among commands you yourself can add. For instance, in the Address Book section of the navigation system, you can add “Voice Tags” to addresses you enter, which then allows you to set them as destinations via the Voice button.

One of the most oft-mentioned features of SYNC is its ability to incorporate your USB device (specifically Apple’s iPod) into the audio system. To get your iPod to work with SYNC, all you have to do is plug your Apple-supplied dock connector into the provided USB port on the dash or in the center console, and then switch to the USB source in the Audio subsystem. SYNC will try to index all of your songs, and upon its completion, will allow you to play songs via name, artist, genre, or to play all songs on the USB device. This makes it far easier to find and play a particular song than has been found on similar systems, both stock and aftermarket, in past years. No longer will you spend minutes of your drive searching for a particular song, not to mention distracted from actually driving your car.

When Sirius is activated with the navigation system, a feature called Sirius Travel Link is available, which gives you traffic updates on your selected route, and gives you the option to avoid them. In the case of accidents, the information may be old, in which case the traffic jam it warns you about could be cleared by the time you get to it. For road work and road closures, it’s best to avoid them when given the option, unless you are familiar with the area and know that the incident won’t affect your travels. There’s also a part of this travel link which illuminates highways in certain colors: blue for clear, yellow for moderate traffic and red for heavy traffic.

With Sirius satellite radio, SYNC doesn’t just let you select a station and listen. It actually gives you the ability to set a “Song Alert” (under the Memo option on the Audio display) which will then scan all the Sirius stations, and when you’re listening to Sirius, will pop up a message letting you know the particular song, what channel it’s about to play on, and give you a button to tune directly to it. When pushing the “Tune” button on this message, Sirius will tune to the channel the song is about to play on, about 5 seconds before the song starts to play. This is a great feature, because with over 100 channels on Sirius, it can be difficult to find a particular song you’d like to hear.

SYNC also features some helpful features not directly related to standard in-car entertainment. These include 911 Assist, Vehicle Health Report, and Weather Link. The 911 Assist feature (standard on some 2010 models, dealer-installed for others) will use your Bluetooth phone to call 911 in the case of an accident where airbags are deployed. The Vehicle Health Report checks all of your car’s subsystems and emails them to you, viewable on the aforementioned SyncMyRide web site. It gives you an easy to view update on what’s going on with your car, along with dealership coupons (for the Ford, Lincoln or Mercury dealership of your choice). Lastly, Weather Link shows you the current weather for wherever you are, a 5-day forecast, and skiing information. It’s definitely useful for when you are traveling.

So, with so many features combined with an easy-to-use interface, SYNC presents a communications center’s worth of information and abilities, from the weather to Sirius radio to up-to-the-minute traffic, not to mention regular AM/FM radio, CDs, and of course, navigation. It’s a great package, well thought out, and well engineered. In the several months I’ve been using it, not once has it crashed, and it just works, as I said in my Lincoln MKS review. The only complaint I’ve come up with is that you can’t disable the “ding” noise that the navigation system plays while giving you directions, without disabling the voice as well. Thankfully, you can control the voice prompt volume separately from the main audio volume, so you can turn it down. The navigation system lowers the main audio volume when it gives you voice prompts, so by lowering the voice prompt volume, you get a lack of audio volume, which is a good audio clue to look at the navigation screen to see your next turn.

By John Suit