MOTOR MOUTH
Wi-Fi woes cause chaos at Paris Motor Show.
It’s almost impossible to describe the chaos that is Paris during auto show season.
This is, after all, a country that never met a straight road it couldn’t tie in knots, a bureaucracy that often mistakes officiousness for organization and, more importantly to those trying to cover an auto show, where high-speed and Internet are as distinct as military and intelligence.
This last proved so problematic that Land Rover, having spent untold millions on providing the most spectacular of presentations for its all-new Discovery Sport — there were barges involved and somehow the Disco managed to, Christ-like, off-road on the river Seine — had to resort to pilfering, like the lowliest of hackers, a local yacht club’s Internet.
Otherwise, thanks to French inefficiency meeting British stubbornness, none of the assembled 500 or so autojournalists would have been able to publish the spectacular image just rendered.
Over at the Infiniti gala for its thinly-disguised Q45 (remember those!) replacement, things were all but as problematic. The setting was decidedly different — all concrete jungle street grunge versus Jaguar Land Rover’s tea-and-cakes ostentation. And the car itself, the Q80 Inspiration, was, if anything, even more phantasmagorical, looking like the bastard child of the four-door Mercedes-Benz CLS impregnated by a macho Dodge Viper. Needless to say, there was much flashing of Nikon.
But, only the first arrivals could actually publish their photos, the stadium’s Internet connection which Infiniti had, like Jaguar, pirated, only able to serve a few of the assembled auto scribes. The leftovers, desperate not be left behind in the tweeting wars, were reduced to pleading for connectivity. There is nothing so quite pathetic as the normally much- indulged autojournalist begging — “Dude, can you spare some megabits?” — for bandwidth.
Inside the actual Mondial de L’Automobile de Paris, things were barely less chaotic. The cars are spread out over seven buildings all supposedly covered by Wi-Fi (pronounced “wee-fee” here in the City of Light), but it, too, was overwhelmed by the thronged press. The automakers, accustomed to such theatrics from French electrons, have graciously provided their own personalized hotspots — complete with more “Dude, have you got the secret password?” panhandling — to fill the gaps. But these, too, varied in their connectedness: Volkswagen and Citroen’s were just blinding, and good luck with Suzuki’s.
The point, in case you’re thinking I’m simply blathering, is that, to various degrees, every single automaker exhibiting at the Paris Expo is currently developing a self-driving auto-
This doesn’t exactly breed confidence in our autonomous driving future
mobile, most of which will require interconnectivity if robotic cars are to safely navigate our roads.
That said, the fact that manufacturers can’t always provide enough bandwidth for a few measly laptops in a very stationary building doesn’t exactly breed confidence in our autonomous future. I resorted to the only reliable solution, buying — a mere 45 euro for 1.5 gigabytes! — an Orange mobile hot spot. Maybe the automotive industry’s future really is best left to Google and the rest of the Twitter generation.
Meanwhile, for a nation that prides itself on socialism — the parliamentary budget was tabled the day before the auto show and the few calls for fiscal restraint were vociferously shot down as anti-French — there was an amazing amount of income inequality among the show’s diverse offering, no better example provided than the proliferation of hybrids on the Porte de Versailles show floor (Europeans, hav- ing been pledged to diesels for some time, are only now discovering the benefits of hybridization).
On the one hand stood the Asterion — 610 horsepower of Huracan V10 married to 300 horses of electric motors — Lamborghini’s riposte to the McLarens and Porsches that have determined that hybridization is actually the new supercharging. One can only imagine how much it will cost if Lamborghini goes ahead with producing the LP 910-4, but there’s no need to wonder how fast it will go, Lamborghini loudly trumpeting that it accelerates from zero to 100 kilometres an hour in less than three seconds and sips fuel at a rate of just 4.1 L/100 kilometres.
On the other side of the paradigm lies Kia’s T-Hybrid, an electrified Optima so cost-conscious that it’s hybridization is powered by only 48 volts of lead-carbon batteries. That’s because the Optima is a “mild” hybrid whose primary fuel-saving technology will be the 1.7-litre turbodiesel under its front hood. The diesel does, however, benefit from an electric supercharger — as well as the traditional turbocharging — for even more low-end torque.
Kia makes no specific claims as to the T-Hybrid’s efficiency, saying only that it should reduce the current Optima 1.7L’s 128 g/km CO2 by 15 to 20 per cent, which should place the overall fuel economy in the sub 4.0 L/100 km region. No plans have been confirmed for production of the T-Hybrid but Kia is looking to “leverage” the technology for Canada.
Assuredly not coming to Canada is the Citroen Cactus Airflow 2L which is also a hybrid but one that is fuelled by compressed nitrogen rather than electricity stored in batteries. Petrol power comes from a 1.2-litre threecylinder PureTech engine that is combined with Citroen’s innovative HybridAir system, which stores compressed nitrogen, accumulated during regenerative braking, at pressures up to 3,200 psi and then uses it to drive the front wheels via a hydraulic motor. The French manufacturer claims an astounding 2.0 L/100 km fuel economy.
That’s a whopping 141 miles per gallon, folks. Connected or not, it proves that the French do have some technological nous after all.