Sync by fant0m www.addic7ed.com
Hello, and welcome to Fifth Gear.
This week we're in Sweden,
where I'll be gaining exclusive access to this building,
the world's most advanced crash test lab,
to witness a brand new one of these get spectacularly ruined, in the name of science, of course.
The lab is run by Volvo,
and we'll be investigating the claim that the work done here
means come 2020, nobody will ever die in one of their cars again.
Plus, Tiff's having the time of his life
in a screaming Lexus LFA hypercar.
Jason will be racing two of the fastest
and best-sounding... Executive saloons
to see which is faster.
And I'll be making mischief
in the latest version of one of the world's best-selling cars,
the BMW 5 series.
But first, here's Tiff.
At £336,000,
the Lexus LFA is the most expensive car
in this whole series of Fifth Gear.
Twice as much as Jason's favourite car ever,
the Ferrari 458 Italia.
Twice as much as the brilliant Lamborghini Gallardo Super Legera.
And nearly three times as much as the gorgeous Aston Martin Rapide.
So, Lexus... Why?
Well, because, just for once, they wanted to leave behind
their reputation for comfort and refinement
and develop the most driver-orientated car they could possibly make.
Which means it should be my kind of Lexus.
It might look like an enormous kitchen appliance,
but it's got 552 brake horsepower,
rear-wheel drive,
and only weighs around 1500 kilos.
Okay, not quite Ferrari or Lamborghini numbers...but close.
The LFA's chassis and body are made almost entirely out of carbon fibre.
Compared to the aluminium they originally planned to use,
this makes it four times stiffer and saves 100 kilograms in weight.
But whilst that stiffness might maximise grip,
it can sometimes lead to a slightly snappy breakaway at the limit.
This might take a bit of getting used to.
Bear with me, won't you?
Through the high-speed first turn at the Rockingham oval,
the LFA's Formula 1-inspired flat underbody and rear diffuser,
helped by its pop-up spoiler, add extra stability.
But there are other cars that have the same aerodynamic gizmos,
so there's got to be more to it than that.
And there is.
The LFA's interior is more like the ultimate computer gamer's set-up,
from the aluminium pedals to the virtual rev counter.
And unlike some cars with their hi-tec computers,
it's not distracting to traditional petrol-heads like me.
For example, you don't have to scroll through millions of menus
just to turn the engine to its maximum power...
...because...it's always on its maximum power.
Oh, yes!
And it's an engine that just has to be heard.
A normally aspirated 4.8 litre V10
that just zooms and zooms and zooms.
9,000 revs...
More, more, more, more, more, more, more, more!
Too much!
Well, I'm really getting into the handling of this Lexus.
You've just got to be egg-shell smooth,
holding a power slide.
Come off too quickly and the car will snap back the other way.
This is mental fun.
Got lovely carbon ceramic brakes.
They're a bit worn.
All very well-worn prototype car, this one.
They've settled just for a single-plate clutch,
so the gear changes do take, like, good old-fashioned tenths of seconds
rather than the milliseconds of a Ferrari,
but the engine is warm to that,
warmed a bit more to the feel of it or driver feel into the car.
And I quite like the idea.
The people that have managed to get their name on one of these,
boy, are they gonna be happy when they get their cars.
It may be overpriced
at three-hundred and...whatever squillion dillion pounds,
but I haven't had a grin this big for ages, I'm not joking you.
In fact, on an empty track on a sunny day
it's worth every penny.
And here's your last chance to enter our amazing competition
to win this beautiful 1999 Boxster,
as well as £1,000 towards your insurance,
courtesy of elephant.co.uk
And that's not all we're giving away.
We've also got places for you and a pal
at the exclusive You Drive at Porsche course at Silverstone,
including a chance to drive your own car on track,
laps in a 911, and some hints and tips from little old me.
We're also giving away a 40-inch LCD TV, an X-Box
and the Superstars V8 Next Challenge driving game.
Plus our favourite five car games,
and a Garmin satnav and a Pure Highway in-car DAB radio,
and a Supertooth Buddy hands-free kit.
For your chance to win, just answer the following question correctly.
Lines close at midday on Thursday 15th July
and three days later for postal entries.
And so to VBH. She's been to the Pyrenees
to see if she can fall in love with a car
that has loads of stuff that she hates...on it.
Welcome to the windiest place currently on earth.
Now then, driver aids, I hate them,
because they give you a licence to be absent-minded
when you're behind the wheel.
Cruise control, lane assist, night vision, multi-cameras,
we don't need them.
So welcome to my idea of hell, the new BMW 5 Series.
The car that provides BMW with more than half its profits
has always been the most entertaining to drive in its class.
But now this sixth version is all about techno, techno, techno.
It's now possible to buy a 5-Series
with party tricks that include parking itself
and spotting pedestrians at night.
You can also have four-wheel steer and an octamerous automatic gearbox.
It's got eight gears. Enough wind now, thanks.
The reason for the blustery conditions
is because I'm in the Pyrenees,
where the team is forcing me to test the technology
on this 535i to find the benefits.
And we'll start with the surround view and reversing assist system,
five cameras that will apparently result in perfect parking.
Okay, I've got a camera in each front-wheel arch pointing sideways
and they feed back to this screen here,
and it helps me to see when I'm nosing out of junctions.
But it's when you go into reverse
that these cameras become seriously clever.
As well as a typical rear view
with targets lines that help you aim into a space,
you can add in the wing-mirror cameras to create a unique view.
Now what IS fantastic and fun
is that it's like having a miniature helicopter on top of you,
giving you a proper bird's eye view.
And I am lining up absolutely brilliantly within the parking lines.
It's good!
It's very clever.
The next piece of technology I want to test
doesn't even need the car to move.
It's called connected drive,
and it's like a concierge service.
Supposedly, even though we're in France,
BMW's directory enquiries operators
will download any address straight to the satnav.
Oh! It's ringing.
Good morning, BMW directory enquiries, Sam, speaking. How can I help?
Morning, Sam, hi, there. My name is Tiffany Dell. You can call me Tiff.
Is it possible for you to send me...
...well, patch me through the details of the nearest Audi dealership?
Yeah, I can have a look for you. Bear with me a second. Thank you, Sam.
Sam, are you still there?
Oh, yeah, no, I'm still here. Sorry. It IS thinking about it.
No, it didn't seem to find any. Maybe if I go into Spain...
Yes, Spain would do.
No, it's not bringing me up anything at all.
Can I try a Mercedes Benz dealer?
I'll have a look.
No, it doesn't have that either.
I tell you what, Sam, just to wrap it up,
how about a BMW dealership?
Oh...that should be in here.
Let's hope so, eh?
Ah, here we go.
Splendid. Can you pop that through to me on my satnav?
I will do. That's on its way down to you now.
Thank you so much, Sam. Thanks a lot.
Have a lovely day. Thank you.
Bye. Goodbye.
So quite a 'selective' service BMW offers there.
Please turn sharp left in 100 metres.
The final test is of the optional four-wheel steering.
Look how the rear wheel subtly turns right then left
to help corner like a car with a much shorter wheel base.
Turn into the bend...
...power...out.
The car shrinks around you and becomes more like a pert 3-Series
then a big 5-Series.
This is the 535 but it's actually got a 3-litre turbo-charged engine,
which gives just over 300 brake horsepower.
It'll hit 62mph in six seconds...
...and it is fantastic.
That power delivery punches you out of each corner,
and the silky, silky smooth gear changes are phenomenal.
And I like a manual gearbox,
but this eight-speed auto is superb.
BMW says this is the only car you'll ever need,
and I agree.
But it's not because of all the wizardry.
It's because underneath this metal it's a fabulous rear-drive chassis.
And that's what makes it fundamentally brilliant, not the frothy toppings.
With prices starting at £28,000,
BMW has just made the best mid-exec money can buy.
Enough wind!
Still to come...
Jason pitting Mercedes against Audi on the limit.
And Jonny finds out how soon a crash like this
will be completely survivable.
Welcome back to Fifth Gear.
It's time for a shoot-out.
To find out which heavyweight German sports saloon is faster.
The £71,000 Mercedes E63
has 518 brake horsepower from its barking V8.
And could be the fastest, angriest
and most exciting boardroom boasting tool there is.
But if executive one-upmanship's your game,
the Audi RS6 has to be top of the list.
It's five grand more expensive than the Merc,
but it's got 54 more horsepower,
four-wheel drive,
and a Lamborghini engine.
So, Mr. Chairman, which will it be?
First we'll set the pace in the RS6.
Now, with me in it, this Audi RS6 weighs over two tonnes.
And if you think that's enough
to dull the response of the 5-litre V10,
well, you'd best think again.
This thing will accelerate to 60 in 4.6 seconds.
It has silky, relentless supply of power,
phenomenal traction, thanks to the quattro system.
But it is a bit dull, if I'm honest.
The ride is very bouncy,
the steering...is a little bit too heavy, actually, at a slow speed,
almost a bit springy.
It's very uncomfortable. I can't get into a seated position that's right.
I'm too far away from the steering wheel, my legs are crunched up.
I just don't feel at home in the car.
Anyway, enough of the bad things. What about the good things?
Did I say the engine was great?
Anyway, let's do a fast one.
It's just too heavy to stop. It doesn't feel nimble at all.
It might have been dull and uncomfortable,
but the RS6 still hauled itself around a rain-soaked circuit
in an impressive 1 minute, 22.2 seconds.
Can the lighter but less powerful Merc beat that?
Now there is such a difference
between this, the Mercedes E63 AMG and the Audi.
This feels...harder, faster, more aggressive...
...tighter...
It just feels like an altogether better car.
I've got a good driving position, I'm comfortable,
I'm being supported in the seats.
The engine... Wow, man, it's brutal.
Compared with the V10 in the Audi,
this V8 feels more angry, more raw.
It's got some get-up-and-go in it,
it sounds really, really horny.
Not a great deal of difference to 60.
This is a tenth of a second faster
but it does feel much quicker than that.
And also, because it's rear-wheel drive,
it's a lot more fun.
Anyway, enough of all that.
Time for a quick one.
At the first checkpoint, the E63 is four-tenths down.
Oh, come on, in we go!
Too much oversteer. Traction.
By the second checkpoint, the Merc has dropped nine-tenths behind.
Right, one more corner.
And by the finish line, the Mercedes has fallen even further back.
1.4 seconds behind the RS6.
On a dry day, it might have been a different story.
But in conditions like these,
four-wheel drive seems the quickest way home.
The World Health Organisation estimates that every year,
1.2 million people are killed
and over 50 million injured as a result of road accidents.
So what if I told you there's one car manufacturer
that claims by 2020,
no-one will get killed or seriously injured
in one of their new cars ever again?
Blimey!
The company in question is Volvo.
And today I'll be discovering what they know that we don't.
Because I've been given unprecedented access
to their top-secret research centre
just outside Gothenburg.
Volvo's research team has analysed the data of 40,000 accidents
in their pursuit to create the world's most protective car.
But it's right here that the real work takes place.
Built in 2000, this dedicated crash test lab
is the most advanced of its type ever.
It's also the busiest, because in the last decade,
nearly 3,000 full-scale accidents have been re-created here.
There are two tracks, each over 100 metres long.
Incredibly, the whole structure can be moved,
so every conceivable collision angle can be staged.
Combined speeds of 125 mph are possible
to an impact accuracy of just 2.5 centimetres.
Up to 30 cameras are trained on the accident spot,
and some of them can be recording up to 200,000 frames every second.
There's even a Plexiglass floor underneath the point of impact
so the Volvo boffins can dissect the damage from down here.
This is data heaven,
and today it's the wreckage of that car there that we'll be poring over.
It's Volvo's newest model, the S60.
Even though it's marketed as the naughty Volvo
because the emphasis is on performance,
it's still laden with clever safety aids.
It can even slam on the brakes
if a pedestrian walks out in front of you.
Avoidance technology of this sort
is key to Volvo's injury-free cars of the future,
because, clearly, the best way to survive an accident
is to not have one in the first place.
However, regardless of how many systems monitor MY driving behaviour
and the behaviour of those around me,
it's inevitable that accidents are gonna happen.
So, what I want to know is this,
how can Volvo hope to build a car so strong, so absorbent,
yet protect the occupants inside no matter what?
Let's have a little crash and find out.
Today's test is going to be an offset frontal impact at 40mph,
replicating a typical head-on crash into another car
doing the same speed.
A deformable block, backed by 850 tons of a movable metal,
simulates the other vehicle.
All system clear. Counting down.
With the all-clear given,
I went to analyse the wreckage
with Volvo's safety chief, Thomas Broberg.
This is actually where you see the crumple zone.
We have deformed the whole package here
but we kept the occupant compartment intact.
In fact, the crumple zone has absorbed the crash forces so efficiently
there's not so much as a cracked windscreen.
This sensor here is looking in front of the car
using a laser technology,
so if you have an object in front of it,
it can calculate the closing velocity to the object.
So it knows? It knows the crash violence before the crash occurs.
And based on that information,
we can choose if we want to have a soft or hard airbag,
and also the force in the safety belts
is changed based on that information.
That means the airbags and seatbelt tensioners don't just go off,
instead they're tuned to respond to the size of the crash,
which makes them far more effective.
Based on the dummy readings from a crash like this,
the dummy here will have minor bruises, minor injuries,
maybe a broken collarbone at tops. Is that all?
Depending, of course, on your health, your status. Yes.
So it was clear the car protected its occupants at 40mph.
But what about Volvo's claims
that ten years from now, you'd be safe at any speed?
The real big enabler for us in the future
is when the car starts to communicate with each other,
starts to communicate with the infrastructure.
When you get that kind of infrastructure,
we can't even imagine what we are able to do from a safety standpoint.
Effectively we're talking about cars fitted with radar and sonar,
so they know exactly where the hazards are.
In theory, hundreds of vehicles could drive bumper-to-bumper
at high speed with their drivers asleep and still no-one would crash.
There'll be a crash test performed here every day for the next ten years
in a bid to perfect systems like that.
After that, the hope is there'll never be another need
for a crash test ever again.
Next time on Fifth Gear, we've got a festival of super cars.
Jason's got an exclusive test of the fastest-ever Ferrari, the 599 GTO.
It's just incredible.
And Tiff finds out how fast you can drive a Mercedes SLS
on the public road.
I'm doing 150!
And finally, here's a reminder of our amazing competition
to win that fantastic 1999 Porsche Boxter,
£1,000 towards your insurance courtesy of elephant.co.uk,
a You Drive at Porsche supercar experience with me,
plus a load of driving goodies.
Lines close at midday on Thursday 15th July,
and three days later for postal entries. Good luck.
Sync by fant0m www.addic7ed.com