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Honda Crash Detection System

Posted by michael on from the pre-crash,-that-is dept.

MImeKillEr writes "MSNBC is reporting that Honda Motor Co. unveiled an early crash-detection system for one of their vehicles. The system is unique in working even before the driver responds. A radar in the front of the car stashed behind the Honda logo detects vehicles within a range of about 300 feet ahead. It then taps the brake and tightens the seatbelt. A buzzer goes off and a light on the dash is illuminated. If the driver responds, the braking power is boosted. If the driver fails to respond, the system kicks in and brakes more while also tightening the seat belt. Unfortunately, Japanese regulations don't allow for the system to fully stop the vehicle."

3 of 868 comments (clear)

  1. How is this going to work? by Zerbey · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You mean to tell me whilst I'm driving on I-4 every morning every time some idiot kid in a tricked out Honda (stupid large muffler, big fin, silly rims... pet hate :)) cuts me off I'll be rammed in the back by the his idiot friend who happens to be tailgating me because my car decides it needs to brake?

  2. Re:DOes it work ? by Black+Perl · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Let's say you're on a 6-lane highway. All three lanes in your direction have cars ahead. You turn this thing on, and it follows the car in front of you.

    Now the highway turns sharply to the right. Suddenly oncoming traffic is directly in front of you. How does it know which car to "follow", i.e. keep a safe distance from? If it makes a mistake, thinking you need to keep a safe distance from oncoming cars, when you go around the bend it'll slam on the brakes and you'll get rear-ended (unless of course the person behind you also has this system, in which case he'd stop too. In fact all cars would stop at every sharp turn).

    Even if the system somehow knows exactly how much the road curves in front of you (which I doubt unless the road has transmitters or other indicators), it would be very hard to maintain a lock on the same car. Police radar cannot distinguish between two cars that are one behind the other. And if it doesn't track a specific car, how can it tell the difference between an oncoming car and a car ahead slamming on the brakes?

    --
    bp
  3. Waiting, wishing, for automated driving by freality · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'll probably piss-off the red-bloded Americans here, but man, I can't wait to not drive my car. I want to have fully automated driving. I want to finish work on a Friday afternoon, go home, grab my stuff, go to my car and say "Miami Beach, Please!". I want to watch movies for a couple of hours or finish reading Dune, and when I wake up, I'm parked right at my favorite beach. Same thing for the reverse trip Sunday night and Monday mornings wouldn't be half as bad. Paint fuel-cells into that picture and it wouldn't even tweak the greens.

    CMU's robotics program has been working on automated driving systems for years. When I was there I heard one of the professors had outfitted his normal home car with about $1500 of equipment and "drove" to school and back every day mostly hands-off. All based on neural-nets and some snazzy control systems.

    And that was like 6 years ago. I'm sure there's wisdom in not rushing into something like this, but I also get the feeling there will be some hard lobbying against it. Like, what happens to truckers, cabbies, UPS/Fed-Ex drivers, etc. etc.? Will the (perhaps undeserved) reputation of dangerous speed-freak truckers come home to roost?

    I wonder how Detroit would feel. At first, it's a shinny new feature == more margin. But beyond that, I can't help but see cars become even more commodity. All you really end up caring about is your comfort/ammenities.. there won't be as much attention to "performance".. ahhh.. Detroit will ~love~ it, BMW won't.

    You could even share these kind of cars, like the Zip cars, but instead of you going to the cars, they come to you. Or perhaps just the under-carriage comes to you and connects to your personal travel cabin. Then, you pull out of the driveway and merge into a long train of like-designed cabins-on-wheels, all virtually-linked together via 802.11z. The road/car system routes you shortest-dijkstra-path to your destination and then your car parks itself once it's dropped you off. There's traffic density that would make clog up modern highways for years, but its all flow-controlled, so you go 120MpH with only inches between cars, so your trip takes half the time.

    The moving sidewalk (armchair) of the future? :)