Lamborghini Aventador SV: A nip, a tuck and a hell of a ride (CNET On Cars, Episode 90)

[SOUND] Aventador SV, what else do I have to say? We'll do the simplest, most satisfying car repair and show you the top five cars that still come with a stick. Time to check the tech. [SOUND] We see cars differently. Nice. We love them on the road and under the hood, but also check the tech. And are known for telling it like it is. Ugly is included at no extra cost. The good, the bad, the bottom line. This is CNET On Cars. Welcome to CNET On Cars, the show all about high-tech cars and modern driving. I'm Brian Cooley. Well Lamborghini's Aventador LP 754 is already a handful of hell, a lot of power on four driven wheels. How do you possible add on to that? By adding two little letters, SV. Let's drive them and check the tech. [MUSIC] [SOUND] [MUSIC] The [UNKNOWN] SV is an [UNKNOWN] that is more and less. More horsepower, 50 of them. Less weight, 110 pounds. [NOISE] A little less time to 60, about a tenth of a second. And more RPM to the red line. Another 150 on the clock. The result is the fastest production Lamborghini ever. And they got there with tuning and tech. Spotting an SV is easy, look for the four pipe exhaust unique wheels and yeah, that wing. [NOISE] Now if this In general are no Ford Super Duty. They're already light cars, already full of aluminum, and carbon fiber body panels and structure throughout. So, where did they find another 110 pounds to take out of this thing? What they did was they put more carbon fiber in around the body components They also took out the head unit. No nav, no radio, no audio system unless you really beg for it. Carpets? No. The seats, they're really church pews, are carbon fiber shells with almost no accommodation. You can move them back and forth, that's it. You'll feel the rivets under your ****. Notice the very different LCD instrument panel than we saw in the base Aventador. More prominence to the RPM Shift indicators, and g-force gauge. And yellow. Now back here in the engine room is also more familiar territory. The architecture of this engine is the same as a non-SV, 6.5-liter V12. With direct injection, dry sump lubrication, what you're missing is any kind of blower or turbo, they don't do that in this engine room. However, you do have a lot of tweaks to the breathing You've got a variable intake system. You've got variable exhaust system. And in between the two you've got a differently curved variable valve timing system. All of it about getting air in and out faster. And that's where the numbers get better, 750 horse and it also comes at a higher rpm red line, 8.400. Torque's the same though, 508. Pound-feet, but that's okay. It's still plenty. And all that goes up in kind of an interesting transmission. Where a lot of super cars use a DCT, an automated dual clutch manual gearbox, these guys use an SCT. Instead of ping-ponging the power through two clutches, they ping-pong the power through multiple shift rods. Hence, it's called an ISR, independent shift rod technology. Now, thanks to that big wing out back [SOUND] All that power delivery turns this car into a rocket on the road as opposed to putting it in low Earth's orbit. 0-60, 2.8. [SOUND] Shift times are around 50 milliseconds. That's nipping it F1 territory. Going the other direction, all SVs have big carbon ceramic brakes standard. They hold this card to a stop from 60 in less than a hundred feet. Okay, if I've got to put this guy into a single phrase, it's this: One sinewy SOB. First question I know you You've got is how does the power feel on this versus a non SV? How do you possibly tease that out unless you're on the track and we're not. I mean, come on, another 50 horse power Of course when you're already at this level. I'll be honest, I can't feel it. What i do feel though is the wonderful breathing they used to get there and that you notice at almost every RPM range. Sweet. It wasn't long ago that I drove the base Aventador and I recall it being a little bit more compliant than this. This one's got a real grip to it, it's just hard everywhere, from where you sit So the heavy, heavy load you get on the wheel with this new adaptive steering system and of course it's got the adaptive suspension as well. Magneto wheelogical technology. That I find is calibrated very Very firm, as you might imagine in this car. I'm bringing that up because a lot of supercar makers these days actually are trying to make their supercars more palatable on the road every day. This one doesn't make such compromises. [NOISE] [MUSIC] Well here's where my job gets real easy. Z net style is the only style you can buy a Lamborghini Eventador SV. They're all loaded by definition and that's why they cost a little over $530,000. You're not gonna afford one of these sitting there watching YouTube. But it doesn't really matter if you get back to work. Because these are all sold out anyway. 500 copies. That's all they made. What the SV really stands for is the power of neon. Getting some weight off the ground, moving air through the engine more elegantly and moving air over the body more purposefully. It also reminds us that Lamborghini really is the Sammy David JR of car makers. Firmly believing that nothing Succeeds like excess, Frank. When I come back, I'll show you the most satisfying simple repair you can ever undertake on your car. And we'll see if it makes any sense to buy a used electric car. When CNET On Cars returns. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO] [MUSIC] You know the sound, your battery's dead and there is no good time. The good news is though that replacing your battery is the easiest real job under the hood. Aside from the battery itself, you're gonna want some gloves. It's kind of a nasty part to deal with. This spray protects the terminals, we're gonna use that later. You'll need a wrench to get the battery holder and terminals off, hopefully it's all one size. And some of these little felt rings. These go on the new battery terminals To help prevent corrosion and problems with starting later. [MUSIC] All right, step one is get the negative terminal off your old, dead battery. This is actually how you Safe. A car battery, you take off negative, and interrupt the ground, as opposed to removing positive like you might think. When you're done, secure that thing so it's not flopping around. Step two, take off the positive terminal now, the red one that has the big plus sign next to it. Shouldn't be too hard to spot. And secure that one away from the battery as well. Okay, stop before you go to the next step. Do not lay metal tools around this exposed positive terminal and any other metal around the car. If you do so, you may be doing some freelance welding and you won't like the results. Step 3, you got some kind of a bracket holding your battery down. It needs to come off. It probably uses the same size wrench that you use to take the terminals off, at least if the car maker was thoughtful and gave that some consideration. Okay, now your old, dead, disgusting battery comes out. [MUSIC] Step four, clean the battery terminals, the inside where they attach To your new battery to get a nice contact. Use a rag, maybe you've put some WD40 on there and work it through. And when you're done, put these guys in a safe place away from the battery again. You have a little portable [UNKNOWN] or even a non portable [UNKNOWN] Get in there and get the crap out. It's gonna be gross. Step five, put in the new battery. And of course make sure when the battery goes in, the polarity is the same. That means you bought the right battery, see our video on that, and that means the positive and negative are in the same place in relation this way, and also the side of the battery their on. Okay step six put your mounting bracket back on. You don't wanna forget this. I've seen people do it saying, "It's not going anywhere. It's a big old heavy battery it'll be fine." now it's going somewhere. It may be square looking but believe me it'll move like a bowling ball within your car. Now step 7, you wanna get these little pads we talked about and those go on top of your terminal. These just help prevent corrosion that can cause your car to have a hard time starting later. You always want to A good transfer of current across these terminals. Okay step eight, attach the positive terminal first. Just like it came off last the other way, it goes on first this way. Step nine, you guessed it, now it's time for the negative terminal to go back on. At this point, Your car is now re-energized, just so you know. Dome lights and thing will come on, radio, don't be scared. Okay in your final step, step 10, is to take this battery terminal protection spray, and spray this all over the top of the positive and the negative. Just spray it on each terminal to cover up all the exposed metal parts and the posts. You want to prevent corrosion there which can cause the battery to charge poorly when you're driving and be weak when it's trying to start your engine. All a bunch of good stuff comes from keeping these non-corroded. And that's it. Now the fun part. Go start the car. [MUSIC]. Okay, best part of this show is always this one. It's the one that you drive. Answer your e mails, Let's get started, now we have one here from Robert B. I got a lot along these lines. He's just one of them. Says, conventional wisdom would suggest it's better to buy a used or certified pre-owned car instead of a brand new one. I hardly agree by the way. He goes on to say, however, with new technologies going into cars, especially hybrids and pure electrics What should someone consider when buying a used EV, if doing so at all. Okay Robert this is a great question. Like I mentioned, a lot of folks have been asking this. So let's use a Nissan Leaf as our sample car because they're very common out there. And they can be had very affordably. Of course, you want to look at the usual mileage and condition and price and terms and all of that. But you've got to make sure you shop hard on Nissan Leap for example. A 2012 is currently selling at around 17% of it's original MSRP. Way big depreciation. For a lot of reasons. There's newer technology with longer range. Gas prices are kind of cheap. There were big incentives on the front end. That always drives down the residuals on the back end. And of course, the market for EZ's is still pretty small. A lot of folks simply can't make one work or just don't want one. The next thing to bear in mind is, know the batteries in electric cars, or plug-in hybrids, do have some kind of a memory or a life to them. The idea is that they will get gradually less capacious over time. It depends how the previous owner treated it though. For example, if you look at that Nissan Leaf owner's manual, They call out several things that will actually void your battery warranty. If you expose the card to certain extreme temperature conditions, or if you constantly are topping it up in the 98% range. Plugging it in, plugging it in, plugging it in. Those will actually really wreck its battery life. And capacity storage ability. So it's kind of hard to know how the previous owner did or didn't do those sorts of things. Next point is know the warranty. Now warranties are generally transferable to the next owner as long as you're within the miles and the years. But, make sure you've got some coverage there. And make sure you know the battery warranty specifically. A Nissan lease, for example, has two of them. The earlier, short-range battery cars have a different, shorter warranty than the newer, longer-range, bigger battery cars. So, there's a difference there. So make sure you're shopping the battery warranty, not just the overall car warranty. Finally, know your goals. An EV with limited features, and maybe kinda crappy battery wear and life might be fine for you if you're just using it as your second car to go to and from work and that's it. Or if your goal is simply to be green and you don't drive that much, you don't have to worry about ultimate range, do you have 95 percent range in that pack? And then you can absolutely shop for a steal. Okay, our next e mail comes in from Duncan B who's got a question about batteries and what you do when yours is dead. He says, Ronnie, can you answer whether it's acceptable to jump start modern cars That have a flat battery. Also, is your advice the same when it comes to bump starting a modern car? Now we've done a lot of stuff on batteries lately Duncan, and in this episode we have our how-to about how to change your battery. But hopefully you haven't got to that point yet, and you just want to restart your car. First of all jump starts still work. Every car we've ever encountered in the last 10 years up until the 16's and 17's and going forward still have places to connect a batter for a jump start from another car or another battery or another jump starter, for example. However, increasingly you don't actually connect to the battery terminals. But you'll find remote terminals in the engine bay and then another place for ground because the battery may be buried somewhere else in the car. So know what you're looking for but jump-starts are still totally cool. Now bump starting is when you get a car that has a dead battery and you either push it or aim it down a hill with the ignition turned on The car in second typically. This is only for manual transmission. And then you let the clutch out once you have a little bit of speed. That will kick the engine over, kind of like what a starter motor does but using the rear wheels instead of the starter. And because the ignition and the fuel supply is live, cuz your key's on, the car should start. Here's the problem. You have to have fuel and electrical spark available for this to work. And with modern cars with all these electronic control units. They may not allow it. It depends on a complicated matrix of systems signing off on each other, so you may not have as much luck with bump starting because the electrics in there that manage these cars may not play ball the way older cars did, so bump starting is a little more hit and miss than it used to be. Jump starting you should be fine. Okay. Next email comes in from Bruce M who's got a question about automatic breaking. He says, I know how emergency automatic braking works, but there seem to be different systems, he notes, in different cars. Some are only slow speed. Others seem to work at higher speeds. And of course some will stop and restart your car if you're under cruise control. He asks, is one of these logic systems or the other better, and or safer, than the other? Okay Bruce. There's a lot going on around automatic emergency braking that revolves around your question. The big thing coming up is September 1 of 2022. At which time, by agreement The car makers who sell virtually every new car in the U.S. say they will have adopted automatic emergency braking across their line. Now that's by agreements of car makers, not by federal regulation. However, because this is not a law but an agreement among the car makers, they still have a lot of flexibility to implement automatic braking as they see fit. That means you'll still see variances in terms of behavior, and the logic of what it does in what situation. Now along those lines know that the feds are gonna start to conform a little bit. The way car makers do this when they consider to automatic braking towards the five star safety ratings that are awarded by NHTSA. The National Highway Traffic Safety Association. Starting in 2017 with the 2018 model year cars. If a car maker wants to get that vaunted 5 star rating, they're gonna want to know how is NHTSA testing automatic breaking, and what do I have to do hit that goal. That will naturally tend to make the systems more common and more alike. Another thing to know that in current made cars, you often will find a button or a switch or a setting that lets you adjust the sensitivity Or the distance at which automatic emergency breaking works. How close do you have to be or how fast are you closing on another car or object before it kicks in. So these cars maybe rather odd in a few years When I think automatic emergency braking will likely become a single best practice emblem that is the same way and very likely without any settings for you. I mean, let's face it, you can't get in there and monkey around with the settings for your anti-lock brakes or airbags. I suspect emergency pump braking will go the same way. Okay Henry L. has a question about transmissions and cars that don't sit still. He says, "I've noticed..." When I'm driving a car with a BMW SMG gear box, like a 2010 M5, when I let go of the brakes at a stop, the car just sits there. Then he says, I'll get in a car like a 2013 Cayman with a Porsche PDK, that's a dual-clutch automatic manual, and then when the car is fully stopped and you come off the brake, he says I've noticed it creeps forward like a conventional automatic. He wants to know, why is this? And is it going to wear out the clutch packs in these advanced transmissions? When we talk about transmissions that do this, what we're talking about is a behavior called creep. Creep is when you lift off the brake and the car slowly goes forward at about a half a walk. An automated manual transmission does not need to do this. For example, that 2010 BMW with an SMG gearbox, has a single automated clutch in there, that has to be moved back and forth for every gear change. Other cars, like that Porsche have a dual clutch transmission. It's automated, there's no clutch pedal. But they have two clutches. And so they put the even gears on one, the odd gears on another. It allows them to ping pong The gear selection back and forth between two clutches. They tend to be more advanced, more smooth, but in any case neither of those gear boxes needs to creep. Automatic creep is already in there for one reason, because people missed it. They were used to cars that moved ahead when they took their foot off the break a little bit. In fact Tesla did not have it in the model S for a few years. And then about a year ago, they added it as an option on your dashboard settings, via an over the air software update. Because customers complained saying, you know what? I let off the brake I want the car to start moving forward. It's just something we're used to. And it also leads to smoother launches when you do start from a stop for example. Especially in stop and go traffic. Now in terms of where, there's a lot of factors here. First of all, single versus dual clutch. You have twice as many clutches to wear. The dual clutch transmissions tend to use clutch one for creep because that's the one attached to first gear. Clutch two shouldn't be affected. Also, some of these transmissions have a dry clutch, obviously, to drive, or two of them, or a wet clutch, clutches that are submerged in an oil bath, and that will change the wear in ways that I can't predict. It will vary by manufacturer Also there's nothing to stop you form putting the car into neutral if you want. Not sure if that's going to wear out something else more and just be a lateral. And here's something else to bare in mind, as far as I know most of these automatic manual transmissions when you're on the brake at a stop, they disengage their clutch pack. They're not working against your brakes So I think you're okay in those true stop situations. It's just a creep which you can actually reduce by staying on the brakes a little longer until it's time to really move. [SOUND] In a moment, the top five cars for folks who churn their own butter and sew their own clothes, when CNet On Cars returns. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO] [MUSIC] Welcome back on CNET On Cars coming to from our home at the mountain motor club just north from the Golden Gate bridge. You know the complaint, nobody makes cars with a stick anymore. That's because we don't want them. In the US, over 90% of new cars and light trucks are sold with an automatic transmission. From that you can either infer that that's what we want, or car makers are idiots. I'm going with the former. Worldwide the numbers are a little more balanced. About a third of gas engine cars around the globe Ship with a manual about two-thirds of diesels. Now this list isn't for performance car buffs. You know what cars have a clutch. I'm talking today to the everyday driver who needs an everyday car and is curious about getting one with a manual transmission. Here are the top selling cars of early 2016 that offer one. Number five is the 2016 Ford Focus Focus may be the most manual rich line of any on our list. You can get the five or six speed in any of three trim levels, and I'm not even mentioning the hot ST and RS upper end model. Whether you get a five or six, by the way, is geared to whether or not you get a three or four cylinder engine, but you've got a lot of choices. [SOUND] Number four is the '16 Nissan Sentra. Now, the downside is to get a manual in a Sentra you've got to go low rent, the base trim, the S trim car. Getting a little grim there. All the other Sentras come with a CVT which, in and of itself, may be enough motivation to learn to drive a stick. [MUSIC] Number three is the '16 Honda Accord. The Accord's a real oddball on this list. First of all, it's the only car that isn't a little tiny compact. Second of all, it really rubs Camry and Sonata's nose in it. Cuz they don't offer a manual in any way shape or form. The Accord does on three trim levels, unfortunately none of them have the V6. [MUSIC] Number two is the Toyota Corolla. Now this is interesting cuz as you might imagine, the base Stripped Corolla offers a manual. Okay, not too interesting. But then they have this sleeker model further up in the line, called the S plus MT. The MT stands for manual transmission. So at the way they get a still bargain price Corolla, but with a little more driver involvement that includes your left leg. [SOUND] Now, before I get you to number one, here's the real number one [UNKNOWN] Ram's big trucks are 2500 and 3500. These big boys still offer an option for a manual transmission while Ford Super Duty has long gone all automatic. Now I don't put these at number one, because they are so often commercial or business purchases. Now by the way the Ram 1500, that you would likely get for yourself, that is automatic only. [NOISE] [MUSIC] The number one selling car here in the US that still offers a manual transmission is the Honda Civic, the LX trim, Coup, and Sedan. Now, that means you have to get the 2 liter Older technology engine unfortunately, not the 1 and a half liter turbo motor, that's a big of a comedown. On the other hand, that 2 Liter is still i-vtec, so you can get ready for it to kick in and use your clutch to modulate it. [MUSIC] Thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this episode. By the way if you catch us on YouTube, know that we've moved. We didn't die, we are now within roadshow on YouTube. So if you're on YouTube just search roadshow. Or just Google roadshow YouTube. You;ll find us there in the cnet on cars channel. Hope you'll subscribe. And of course you can always find us on cnetoncars.com. I'll see you next time we check the [MUSIC] [SOUND]