Top 10 Tech Cars 2012

The internal combustion engine strikes back

When people dream about the future of driving, they picture hundreds of millions of cars humming almost imperceptibly on batteries or fuel cells, their power plants emitting water vapor or nothing. Rarely does petroleum fuel—and foul—the green fantasy.

But don’t let that vision distract you from reality. Although the world’s biggest automakers are determined to bring electrified cars to the masses, their real business—and the world’s business—will continue to revolve around the internal combustion engine for decades to come. The signs are accumulating: Morgan Stanley now projects that just 4.5 percent of new cars sold in 2025 will be EVs, sharply down from its previous estimate of 8.6 percent.

Yet change is afoot, change that heralds the remaking of the invention that first began to put the world on wheels about 120 years ago. Most notable over the past year has been the remarkable rise of the turbocharger, as makers from Motown to Munich have begun adopting turbocharging and even supercharging to radically downsize engines, boost fuel economy, and cut pollution—usually without sacrificing anything in power or drivability.

This year’s list shows turbocharging up and down the line, from a Japanese hatchback to a British supercar. Of course, the list has a few EVs and hybrids also; as always, our emphasis is on interesting new technology, not just the market share that it commands for now.

MCLAREN MP4-12C
Now with carbon fiber!

As I coax the McLaren MP4-12C eastward along Route 301 in New York’s Hudson Valley, the tall gates of the Chuang Yen monastery loom, then disappear in a flash. To the monks inside, I’m a silvery, shrieking blur.

They might not agree (and I’m sorry if I busted up their meditation), but the McLaren’s essential nature rings in tune with this Buddhist temple. For all its Formula One credentials, for all its flashy virility and hair-trigger handling, the McLaren also sets a new supercar standard for inner peace.

For the MP4-12C, McLaren refused to accept traditional trade-offs between performance and comfort, and that’s what makes this model the year’s most intriguing new sports car. The company owes its achievement—and its position in this year’s Top 10 list—to its democratization of a weight-saving technology that had been limited to the ultrarich: carbon-fiber construction.

Here “democratization” means that it’s now affordable for the merely rich. The starting price of US $231 400 is by far the lowest of any car ever draped on a carbon-fiber structure. And while you could buy 10 Hyundai Sonatas for that price, recent breakthroughs have McLaren—along with mega-automakers such as BMW—confident that large carbon‑fiber components will eventually trickle down to mass-market cars.

McLaren’s bona fides here are unmatched. The company built and raced the first carbon-fiber Formula One monocoque back in 1981. Every McLaren since has been carbon-fiber intensive, including the MP4/4 racers driven by Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost, which won an unparalleled 15 of 16 Formula One races in 1988. By 1992, the legendary three-seat, $1 million McLaren F1 became the first road-going car with a carbon-based chassis.

Until recently, woven sheets of carbon fiber had to be laid up by hand in a mold, impregnated with resin, then cured for hours in an autoclave oven. It was a black art. Back in 1992, building just the F1’s “tub,” which surrounds the driver, took 3000 hours. By 2004, the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren had chopped that to 400 hours.

For the MP4-12C, McLaren adapted a process called resin transfer molding, which cuts fabrication time by 99 percent. Bundled fibers are stuffed into a huge mold, epoxy resin is injected, and heat and pressure do the rest. The one-piece tub, called a MonoCell, takes a mere 4 hours to build and weighs 75 kilograms, less than many passengers.

Such strong, lightweight bones are key to the new car’s remarkable structural rigidity and agile yet compliant suspension. The entire car weighs 1301 kg, nearly 80 kg less than its main competitor, the Ferrari 458 Italia. The hollow carbon structure forms a “safety survival cell” akin to that of an F1 car, with aluminum crumple zones in front and in the rear that are easy to replace.

That light weight also means low emissions: The McLaren produces less than 300 grams of carbon dioxide per kilometer driven, topping its class. Because the shell resists twisting so well, the suspension can be optimized to provide the best possible ride and handling. And carbon fiber is more resistant to fatigue than metal. So the McLaren will, in theory anyway, feel as tight and new in 10 years as it does the day it leaves the showroom. A compact 441-kilowatt (592-horsepower), twin-turbocharged 3.8-liter V-8 lies smack dab in the car’s center of gravity. Add a seamless seven-speed, dual-clutch automated manual transmission and the McLaren casually puts up supercar numbers: 0 to 97 kilometers per hour (0 to 60 miles per hour) in 3 seconds and a top speed of 330 km/h (205 mph).

Dihedral doors do without old-fashioned door handles: Sweep a hand along a sensor and the doors pivot upward with one-finger ease; the doors open less widely than conventional ones.

The cockpit is designed for a fast driver and a stupefied passenger, not for downloading reruns of “The Office.” There’s not a single button on the steering wheel, which is flanked by a pair of paddle shifters, whose action is a little stiff for my taste; McLaren says an adjustment may be in the works.

Yet although interfaces are simple, the technology below is anything but. And the tour de force is the ProActive Chassis Control system, which does away with conventional shock absorbers and heavy antiroll bars.

Instead, the McLaren’s body motions and ride stiffness are controlled entirely through hydraulics, within a series of linked, pressurized cylinders at each corner of the vehicle. Imagine water being sloshed around the floor of a boat as it heaves and pitches and you’ll have an idea of how it works.

The system works by sending fluid from front to back or from side to side, in a fraction of a second. Set the system to Normal and the McLaren trundles over potholes as obligingly as a luxury sport sedan. And unlike some cars with adaptive systems, the McLaren undergoes a serious Jekyll-to-Hyde personality change when you crank up its settings: In Track mode, body-roll stiffness is doubled, gearshifts are eye-blink fast, and the special Aero mode lifts the rear wing slightly for increased downforce at exhilarating speeds. That wing also acts as an air brake, shooting upward to clamp down the rear under hard braking, countering the car’s forward weight shift to allow the rear brakes to apply a greater share of force.

From public roads in New York to a twisty racing circuit in Fontana, Calif., the McLaren made a convincing case for inclusion in any supercar smackdown: Its body stayed almost eerily flat at speeds that would have had a Porsche 911 leaning over and its tires howling.

This may seem strange to say of a car that only the select few can possibly afford, but the MP4-12C is a wonderful deal: It delivers seven-figure technology at a six-figure price