This is it. The cheapest new Porsche you can buy. The 2020 Porsche Macan starts at $52,250, including destination, a little over half what you’ll pay for a base 911 Carrera. What that gets you is a premium compact SUV powered by a 248-hp turbocharged four-cylinder engine, a description that could equally be applied to an AWD Lincoln Corsair that’s about $12,000 cheaper. Is the Porsche badge really worth that much more?
The truth is, of course, you’re buying more than just the badge. Although it lacks the exhilarating punch of the $61,000 Macan S, this entry-level Macan retains all the other goodness of its V-6-powered sibling. As with the Macan S, the 2019 model year upgrades build on the baby Porsche SUV’s benchmark dynamics and trademark design cues to deliver improved ride comfort, lower noise levels, a state-of-the-art communications and navigation system, and simple but effective styling tweaks.
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Much of what’s on display in the little booths that line the automotive halls at the 2020 CES techstravaganza is nitty-gritty hardware developed by devoted engineers toiling in the trenches to realize the autonomous-vehicle future that we’re promised (or is it “threatened?”) is just around the corner. Most of this stuff bores us to somnambulism, but here are a few crucial pieces to that automotive puzzle that you as a serious car lover should probably know about.
Bosch Long-Range Lidar
Lidar has long been the expected “third leg” of the tech-stool required to support high-level autonomy, compensating for weaknesses in the other two legs—radar (might miss a narrow motorcycle with plastic fairings and such) and cameras (which can be dazzled by sun or obscured by rain, fog, and snow. To date the cost of high-reliability lidar units has proven prohibitive. Bosch claims it is preparing for mass production [...]
At CES 2020, Nissan’s near-production-ready Ariya SUV concept glittered under the lights. Fifteen miles to the northeast, on a specially prepared course at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway, sat a squat little prototype Leaf with the Ariya’s proposed powertrain—and we got to drive it.
Nissan calls the powertrain e-4ORCE, a name that barely makes sense as English (if at all) even if the concept behind it is plenty interesting. The prototype we drove was essentially a Leaf Plus with two motors, so power-wise everything is slightly more than doubled, with total system output sitting at 304 horsepower and 502 lb-ft of torque.
But Nissan didn’t just lob a second motor into the back. It put some thought into how it could leverage that second motor to make the car better to drive, and for that the company drew on its experience with four-wheel-drive and electronic chassis control in [...]
Sliding a window shade up and down in an airplane or the back seat of your Uber Black is so last decade. These days, a button press can electronically darken either of those apertures almost completely, no moving shade necessary. Global automotive supplier Gentex supplies the electrochromic windows for the mighty Boeing 787 Dreamliner, and the fancy glass is now showing up on 777s and some Airbus planes. While the basic technology has been used for years to electrically dim rear-view mirrors and even appeared in limited form in Mercedes-Benz sunroofs, the Gentex display at the 2020 CES included several new automotive glass applications of the technology. Here are a few ways this magic tech could infiltrate new cars in the coming years:
Dimmable Sunroof
This application faces the fewest hurdles, and hence may be the first to really take [...]
A few years ago, I attended Nvidia’s GPU Technical Conference, and during its Steve Jobs–ian keynote address, Nvidia founder Jenson Huang invited Elon Musk onto the stage for a friendly chat about technology. But by August of last year, the valentines floating back and forth that day had ended. After severing ties with Mobileye, who were the computing supplier of Autopilot’s HW1 (Hardware 1), Musk then jettisoned Nvidia, who’d been supplying the electronics for HW2 and HW2.5, too. The substantially more powerful HW3 (needed to absorb the data firehose that accompanies Full Self Driving) would now be designed in-house by Tesla, and in an especially Alpha moment of Silicon Valley chest-beating, claimed it could calculate at a rate of 144 TOPS (trillion operations per second)—clobbering the 21 TOPS of Nvidia’s Drive Xavier. Nvidia responded with a polite retort to those claims: Drive Xavier can do 30 TOPS, and moreover that’s the wrong comparison anyway. Drive [...]
