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2016 Technology of the Year Finalist: Audi Virtual Cockpit

The heart of most infotainment systems is a touchscreen in the center console. In many systems, some information can be sent to the gauge cluster in slightly redacted form – stripped-down navigation commands, basic audio info, that sort of thing. To get the full story, the driver has to take their eyes off the road and look to the middle of the dashboard. Audi's Virtual Cockpit, in essence, ditches the center screen and places all that information in the gauge cluster. The high-resolution TFT screen is just over a foot wide, and it has two main modes: Classic view, and Infotainment view. Classic looks like many other traditional TFT gauge clusters, with large traditional gauges and the ability to display a decent amount of information in the space in-between. Go into Infotainment view, and the gauges shrink and head to the lower corners, freeing up a much larger amount of real estate for, say, the nav system map. The gauges also get out of the way when utilizing the menu, entering a destination, or that sort of thing. The four main modes are standard stuff. Virtual Cockpit will show you navigation, media, phone, and trip computer information in large or small formats. You interact with Virtual Cockpit with a familiar MMI wheel-type controller in the center console, like in many other Audis, or with buttons and a scroll/push wheel on the left side of the steering wheel. Climate control functions are handed by physical controls cleverly integrated in the center three vents. It takes a lot of processing power to make all this work as well as it does, and that's handled by NVIDIA's Tegra 3 processor – a quad-core processor usually seen in tablets and smartphones. The system is quick and responsive, and we found the high-resolution screen to be impressively sharp. If there's a downside, it's that Virtual Cockpit doesn't leave an opportunity for a passenger to step in and, say, enter a destination or change the radio station without altering what's right in front of the driver. It could be inconvenient at best, distracting at worst, to have the nav system directions you're trying to follow suddenly be superseded by the audio menu. Adding a small secondary screen for the passenger could be one fix; a connected companion smartphone app another. In the meantime, it's an impressive implementation of a clever idea.

X1, 3 Series power BMW back into global luxury autos sales lead

BMW managed to eke ahead of Audi for the global luxury sales crown in February. According to Bloomberg, BMW saw deliveries swell by 7 percent in February, besting the 3.2 percent jump enjoyed by Audi and giving BMW a 407-unit delivery lead over its rival last month. Mercedes-Benz, meanwhile, continued to falter, with the brand selling some 37,229 fewer machines than BMW, whose factories are running at full capacity to keep up with demand. Models like the X1 (shown above) enjoyed a sales increase of 40 percent in February while the company's bread-and-butter 3 Series jumped by 26 percent.
Mercedes-Benz hopes to stem its continued market share loss with the addition of the entry-level CLA sedan to its portfolio in April. The company is set to roll out an updated version of its cash-cow E-Class at the same time, and a new-generation S-Class will follow along shortly thereafter. Meanwhile, the company is increasing production to meet demand for its A and B-Class models.

2017 Frankfurt Motor Show | Observations on the Ferrari Portofino, Honda Urban EV and more

Related: We obsessively covered the Frankfurt Motor Show — here's our complete coverage The 2017 Frankfurt Motor Show kicked off the fall reveal season with an impressive array of powerful cars blended with forward-looking concepts. It's a seminal period for automakers, who find themselves at the intersection of disruption and opportunity. With that in mind, here are four takeaways from Frankfurt. The transformation of the curvy yet overbaked Ferrari California T into the Portofino is complete, and its coming-out party in Frankfurt served notice that Ferrari's entry-level sports car is much more formidable. There was nothing wrong with the California (and later the California T), but the Portofino features a cleaner look with stronger lines and an elegant resemblance to the rest of the Ferrari family. The California name is a good one. Used on a number of memorable cars in the 1950s and '60s, it's steeped in tradition, and certainly Ferrari will dust it off again. But switching to Portofino, the name of a scenic town in Italy, is a nice way to change the conversation and generate fresh interest in this part of the Ferrari portfolio. Man, people are stoked over the Honda Urban EV concept. Why? I assume it's the retro look that harks back to early Civics, and the lack of information about the concept itself. What people don't know, they're imagining. Honda hasn't even confirmed the range, the car is very small, and it likely won't be sold in the United States. With this dearth of facts, enthusiasts are filling in their own blanks. I guess that's OK. Count me among the intrigued. When I saw pictures of this thing early Tuesday morning, I was pretty excited, too. We do know Honda is expanding its electric strategy, and two-thirds of its new vehicles sold around the world will have some form of electrification by 2030. The Urban EV launches in Europe in 2019, and a hybrid CR-V rolls out in Europe next year. Unconfirmed for the U.S. market, it seems like a no-brainer to bring that version of the CR-V here. The electrification and autonomous tech parade of concepts continues. You gotta be there. It's the cost of doing business in the modern automotive landscape. This technology takes years to develop and launch, so the next best thing to remind the world you're trying to be cutting-edge is to show off lots of fancy concepts. Frankfurt had plenty. A couple standouts: The BMW I Vision Dynamics and Audi's Elaine and Aicon.