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Hamilton Spectator
2 hours ago
- Automotive
- Hamilton Spectator
Ford's smallest pickup truck, a popular hybrid, finally gets a grip
I could fit four others in this cabin and bring home a hefty haul from a Swedish, flat-packed furniture store. I could do a heavy Saturday morning bulk-retail run in the morning and navigate with ease Toronto's congested downtown core in the afternoon. I could head out to visit friends in rural Ontario in the evening. And I could do all this without blowing the bank; this capable compact vehicle is miserly on fuel. Driving the refreshed 2025 Ford Maverick hybrid, I'm reminded of how pragmatic this compact pickup truck is. From winding back-roads to highways to smallish parking spaces, the feeling of 'I know it's a truck, but it feels and drives like a car' is a constant. The refreshed 2025 Ford Maverick hybrid is a practical alternative in the crowded world of compact crossovers. At roughly two-thirds the price of the average new vehicle in Canada — this clocked in at more than $60,000 in 2024 — it's a smart-sized pickup truck for urban life. The all-wheel drive version consumes just 0.1 litres of fuel more per 100 km than the front-wheel drive vehicle. The 2025 model is Ford's mid-cycle refresh. Ford said Maverick hybrid-buyers yearned for more than front-wheel drive. So that's what they're getting. Inside, the highlight is a new 13.2-inch infotainment system, nearly double the size of the previous eight-inch version. It's quick and responsive and features wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. There are lightly refreshed exterior styling cues to modernize the vehicle's appearance. Although there are still hard plastic bits on the interior, practicality scores high. On the road, the all-wheel-drive version handles similar to the front-wheel drive vehicle; it's fairly smooth, sturdy and comfortable and has ample power. It is in inclement weather and less-than-ideal driving conditions that the all-wheel-drive version comes into its own. Having power available to each wheel coupled with a terrific hybrid system truly is the best of worlds. The Maverick feels more like a car than a pickup truck. It's small footprint makes it easy to manoeuvre, especially in highly congested urban areas and it can be a viable alternative to a compact crossover. It's not cumbersome. There's no feeling of rumbling down the road. This small and sensibly sized truck is more than enough for most needs. All hybrid versions use Ford's continuous variable transmission. The front-wheel drive hybrid system can tow up to 2,000 pounds. The all-wheel drive vehicle can double that, if you choose the tow package. Payload in the 4.5-foot bed — that is the amount of weight that can safely be put there — is 1,500 pounds for front-wheel drive and 1,400 pounds for all-wheel drive. So, yes, this Maverick does all the things a pickup truck does, even though it is relatively small. Glancing at the bigger picture, the overall Maverick lineup includes a nonhybrid trim, an off-road variant and a 'street-truck' version, new for 2025, called the Lobo. As one of just two compact pickup trucks in the Canadian market — the Hyundai Santa Cruz is the other — Ford has quite the breadth of offerings in this niche market. With a starting price of less than $40,000, the all-wheel drive hybrid Maverick is an smart option for those who want cheap and cheerful paired with capable and confident. Type: Four-door compact pickup truck; front-engine, front or all-wheel drive Engine: 2.5-litre, four-cylinder; 191 horsepower, 151 pounds-feet of torque (motive force) Fuel: 5.8 litres/100 km in the city; 6.9l/100 km on the highway; 6.3l/100 km combined Transmission: Continuous Variable Cargo: 1,500 pounds payload capacity Towing: 2,000 to 4,000 pounds Price: $37,100 all-wheel drive
Auto Blog
12 hours ago
- Automotive
- Auto Blog
Walmart is selling a ‘user-friendly' $200 touchscreen car stereo for only $40, and it's the ‘perfect device'
Autoblog aims to feature only the best products and services. If you buy something via one of our links, we may earn a commission. A touchscreen car stereo and backup camera are standard these days, and they allow you to control your music more easily, use navigation and other apps, and park effortlessly. If your current vehicle doesn't have one, it can feel like you're falling behind the times. With the Pentantan 7-Inch Touchscreen Car Stereo, you can bring the latest tech to any ride, and for a limited time this $200 device is on sale for just $40 at Walmart. Installing a new stereo has never been so affordable and easy. Pentantan 7-Inch Touchscreen Car Stereo, $40 (was $200) at Walmart The Tentantan 7-Inch Touchscreen Car Stereo allows for hands-free connectivity via Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, and Bluetooth. It is equipped with Google Assistant and works with an array of essential apps and navigation tools, allowing you to keep your hands on the wheel and your eyes on the road. Its 1080P full high definition display is highly responsive to touch commands and presents crisp lines and vivid colors. Its backup camera provides a clear 170-degree view, even at night, and the camera itself is waterproof so you don't have to worry about damage. On top of all that, it's easy to install, attaching to the dash or windshield via suction. Buyers have been impressed by this 'super cool' stereo, saying the 'sleek' unit is 'easy to install,' 'user-friendly,' and praising its 'reliable camera.' 'Perfect device,' wrote another reviewer. 'I've always envied my wife's CarPlay feature in her car, but I was also ambivalent about it. I tried various apps to simulate the CarPlay experience until I found a device that allowed me to install CarPlay in my old truck at a lower price. Now I'm totally in love with it. It's easy to operate, functional, and wireless. You can't ask for more.' As one buyer put it, the stereo 'offers everything I need for a modern driving experience.' For a limited time, the Tentantan 7-Inch Touchscreen Car Stereo is on sale at Walmart for a whopping 80% off, dropping the price from $200 to just $40. If you need to upgrade your stereo, that's too good a deal to pass up. About the Author Nick Hilden View Profile
New York Post
a day ago
- Automotive
- New York Post
Get Apple CarPlay and Android Auto in any car for just $80
Discover startups, services, products and more from our partner StackCommerce. New York Post edits this content, and may be compensated and/or receive an affiliate commission if you buy through our links. TL;DR: Be prepared for road trips all summer long and beyond with the 9″ Wireless Car Display with Apple CarPlay/Android Auto Compatibility and Phone Mirroring, now for just $79.99 (reg. $179.99), with no coupon code required. Thinking about upgrading your car before hitting the road this summer? How about a total revamp of your entertainment system for just $80? This 9-inch wireless car display, featuring Apple CarPlay and Android Auto compatibility, as well as phone mirroring, gives your ride a total refresh, and it's $100 off just in time for road trip season. Upgrade your drive with this sleek 9-inch wireless display, featuring a crisp 1024×600 FHD touchscreen and seamless Apple CarPlay or Android Auto connectivity. There's no intense installation required — just plug it into your car's wide-voltage cigarette lighter. It's compatible with all car models, and measures just 9 inches. Advertisement Thanks to the smartphone compatibility, you'll be able to take advantage of all of your favorite apps, maps, videos, music, and more. You can pick your favorite navigation app to guide the way while listening to the tunes on your favorite playlist. And you can go hands-free and control things with your voice with Siri or Google Assistant. The audio is seamlessly transmitted to your car stereo speakers via Bluetooth. You can also adjust the brightness according to the time of day and pair it with a 1080p reversing camera for safe backing up. Upgrade any car for under $100 with the 9″ Wireless Car Display with Apple CarPlay/Android Auto Compatibility and Phone Mirroring, now only $79.99 (reg. $179.99), with no coupon code needed. StackSocial prices subject to change.
Android Authority
a day ago
- Automotive
- Android Authority
This $15 Raspberry Pi hack fixed my car's biggest Android Auto annoyance
Calvin Wankhede / Android Authority Android Auto turned ten years old this year, and most automakers have adopted it by now. But unless you drive a car from the past couple of years, chances are that it does not support wireless Android Auto. A good number of vehicles require a wired USB connection to establish a connection with your phone every single time you need to use Android Auto. That's not a big hassle, but I find it a bit annoying to plug in on shorter trips or when I'm running errands. Luckily, a simple USB dongle like the AAWireless TWO dongle is all you need to make that wired connection wireless. That dongle works well enough, and is reasonably priced at $65, but I recently found out that you can make your own for a fraction of the cost. And after driving around with one such DIY wireless Android Auto adapter for two weeks now, I'm left wondering why I didn't try it sooner. The experience is nearly on par with wired and best of all, it only costs $15 and a few minutes of your time. A wireless Android Auto adapter for just $15 Andy Walker / Android Authority The appeal of wireless Android Auto is rather straightforward: you hop in your car, push the ignition, and your phone automatically connects within seconds. You don't have to worry about fumbling in the dark or keeping unsightly cables tidy. My car's USB ports are in a rather conspicuous position, and I don't like how cables run alongside the gear selector. A wireless Android Auto dongle circumvents all of this, allowing you to tuck a device into the USB port and forget about it. The DIY solution I ended up with involves using a Raspberry Pi configured to act as a wireless bridge between my phone and the car's infotainment system. The Pi is a small, low-power computer that connects over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth to my phone. It draws power from the car's USB port and passes Android Auto data to the infotainment system over it. The car thinks the phone is plugged in, and the Raspberry Pi is entirely transparent. All of this is possible thanks to an open-source project — descriptively titled WirelessAndroidAutoDongle. You can find detailed instructions on how to set it up below, but first, how well does it work in the real world? How well does the DIY dongle work? Calvin Wankhede / Android Authority While a DIY solution may sound unreliable, I was pleasantly surprised to find that the Pi-based wireless Android Auto dongle worked almost flawlessly. Every single time the car starts up, my phone connects to the dongle automatically. The initial handshake takes place over Bluetooth, but the phone then connects to the Raspberry Pi's Wi-Fi Direct network for a more stable connection. The car doesn't seem to know the difference and over the two weeks that I used it, I faced no unexpected Android Auto disconnections or drop-outs. Music and navigation worked well, even simultaneously with a split-screen view. The interface did not skip a beat either. Users of older dongles like the Moto MA1 have long complained of laggy performance and intermittent audio stutters. No such problems here — navigation worked flawlessly even when I received a phone call, and the music always resumed immediately after the call. Music, navigation, phone calls, and text-to-speech worked flawlessly, even completely wireless. Having said that, I did notice inconsistent performance in one area: Google Assistant voice commands. Basic commands like navigating to a particular location and notification readouts worked fine, but replying to text messages was sometimes a hit and miss experience. It worked fine about half the time but sometimes left me waiting for a long time after I dictated a response. Discussions on the project's Github page suggest that this issue might be linked to the particular Raspberry Pi I used — a more powerful model may not have this problem. Or it could be my car's infotainment display because the issue does not seem to affect everyone. Unlike the AAWireless Two, the DIY dongle does not have a companion smartphone app. This is not a big deal — the AAWireless app has limited settings anyway, but it also means you cannot delete or re-order smartphone connection priorities. After pairing two phones to the Raspberry Pi, both would compete to connect every time I entered the car. This can get annoying quickly if you take turns driving with your partner. Commercial dongles have a push button to quickly switch between paired devices, but the DIY dongle lacks one. The only way to work around this is to disable Bluetooth on the phone that you don't want to connect to the dongle. Aside from occasional slow voice recognition, the DIY dongle lacks a way to quickly switch between paired devices. These two annoyances aside, I had a nearly flawless experience with the DIY dongle. Android Auto does take slightly longer to pop up than the wired method, but it's still a tolerable 30 seconds. This cannot be sped up since the Raspberry Pi needs to boot up a lightweight Linux OS every time it's powered on. But this is also true of commercial dongles like the AAWireless TWO. Setting up the DIY wireless Android Auto dongle Calvin Wankhede / Android Authority If you're sold on the idea of making your own wireless Android Auto dongle, the good news is that you only need a $15 Raspberry Pi and a microSD card. The cheapest model you can get away with is the Pi Zero 2 W, but you could also use the Pi 4 or Pi 3 A+. Older models don't support USB OTG functionality. Next, you'll need to flash the adapter software onto a microSD card using a computer. Here's how: Insert a microSD card into your PC or Mac, either directly or using an adapter. You don't need much storage — I used an old 8GB card. Download an image flashing tool like balenaEtcher and the pre-built SD card image from the Wireless Android Auto Dongle Github page. Open balenaEtcher, click on 'Flash from file' and browse to the image you downloaded in the previous step. Click on 'Select target' and pick the microSD card you inserted earlier. Hit Flash and wait for the process to complete. Once flashed, you can eject the microSD card from your computer and insert it into the Raspberry Pi. With the image loaded onto the Pi, it's ready for the car. But first, make sure that you've connected to your car's Android Auto in wired mode at least once. After that, you can disconnect your phone and connect the Raspberry Pi to the car instead. On the Pi Zero, you'll need to use the microUSB port that's labelled USB — not power. Assuming the car is running and the Pi is powered, head into your phone's Bluetooth settings and search for a device named WirelessAADongle-*. Connect to it and accept the prompt to connect to the Pi's Wi-Fi network. You should now see Android Auto pop up on your car's display. Once paired, your phone will automatically connect to the Pi every time the head unit starts up. And from then on, you never have to plug in your phone for Android Auto again — except maybe to keep the battery topped up on longer drives.
Time Business News
2 days ago
- Time Business News
Find Out What ChatGPT Knows About You—How To Make It Forget
If you've been a faithful user of ChatGPT you're aware that the AI chatbot could have certain details about you, or even details that you'd prefer not to. This article will help determine what information ChatGPT has on you and how you can remove information out of its database. ChatGPT collects fragments of information of your conversations and stores the messages in memory for later references. In particular, it might store information regarding your job as well as your place of residence as well as your interests and hobbies and provide additional details in the future. (By by the way, it's a lot more specific about the majority of people, so we'll have to reveal what it's acquired in the near future). There's usually a sign by way of a photograph of the extent to which ChatGPT keeps a specific information about you. You'll see the 'Updated saved memory' label in your chats. Click on the label to find out the specific information ChatGPT has stuffed into its memory to store future information. It's not required to rely on your eyesight in order to recognize the small labels that appear in conversations. It's easy to ask ChatGPT to reveal the data it has on you. Answer this question: What do you know about me? This is only available to those who have an ChatGPT account. The memories are saved for paid and free account users, whereas previously you required an account before the AI being capable of keeping the records of your personal information. When I entered the request above into my account, it popped up with a huge list of things it had about me, like the novels I'd written as well my current home and locations I'm considering moving to, along with the music genres I like. After I entered the above prompt, and towards the bottom of the lengthy list of data ChatGPT had saved for me it asked me 'Would you like me to forget or update any of this?' I had logged on to ChatGPT to look up the purchase of a new car. the stored data included a list with the vehicles I had selected. I informed ChatGPT the reason why 'I have bought the car and it's a Honda Jazz Hybrid,' and it changed its memory in line with my request. This is evident by the 'UPDATED SAVED MEMBER' label. 'If you ever want help with maintenance tips, fuel efficiency tracking, or setting up Android Auto in your Honda Jazz Hybrid, just shout,' it stated. See Top Best Paying Jobs in Basic Industries 2025 If you click on one of the 'Updated saved memory' labels You'll see an option to manage your memory. You can access the menu by logging into the icon that represents your profile, selecting Settings > Personalization, and then clicking Manage Memories (which is a tiny text that appears below the Options for Reference for saving memory). You will now have an extensive review of the information which ChatGPT is storing on your. Select the bin icon at the top of every piece of data to erase it or click'Delete All' on the right-hand left side of the page, to delete the memory of the chat. It has been reported that asking ChatGPT to erase the memories of the normal chat doesn't always work, therefore it's suggested to use this method. If you'd like to chat with ChatGPT about a personal issue or anything else you do not want to save to be referred to later on, it's possible to keep an ongoing chat. It is possible to activate them by pressing the speech bubble that has a an dotted line close to your profile image in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Chat in temporary mode mode the AI does not save any information about the chat in its memory nor show it on the chat history. You won't be able to return to chat after you've ended the chat. If there's information you'd like to remember for the future, make sure you record it and copy it back into the chat screen, or take photos. You might be content with ChatGPT keeping your personal data but you do not want anyone else to have access to your account, and then stealing the data. Therefore, it is advisable to enable two-factor authentication to eliminate the possibility of third-party hackers getting access to your account. To enable this, simply click on the profile icon and then Settings. Select Security under the Settings menu then select Multi-factor authentication. You'll receive a QR code to authenticate using an authenticator app such as Authy. After you've signed to ChatGPT, you'll have to input a six-digit number in your authenticator application each time you login to ChatGPT using another device. This makes sure that any person who has access to your password will not be in a position to gain access to your account. ChatGPT can be described as an AI-powered natural language processing program that allows for real-time conversations using chat bots. It allows you to ask model questions and let it assist you in writing emails, articles and even code. Common phrases and general terminology: ChatGPT often uses repeated and formal terms such as 'in summary' and 'ever-evolving landscape.' Artificial illusions and misinformation: ChatGPT can produce errors and misleading information, like inaccurate citations and fanciful assertions. ChatGPT is not able to give the exact same response and form to every person who asks the same question. While it is possible to find responses are identical for the same or closely related questions, there are variations that can occur in response to the particular details, context and the quality of the information that you submit. ChatGPT can save personal information from your conversations in order to tailor the future replies, but you retain control over this information. When you ask, 'What do you know about me?' you can find out what's saved, correct any errors or erase certain memories using the 'Manage memories' option in Settings. In private chats, the temporary mode ensures that no data is saved, and activating two-factor authentication gives you additional security to secure your account. These tools allow you to manage your personal information and keep your chats using ChatGPT private and secure. TIME BUSINESS NEWS
