Latest Honda Advanced Safety Vehicles push vehicle-to-vehicle, vehicle-to-road communications

The whole idea with future vehicle safety isn't to improve crash protection or enhance vehicle dynamics; it's to increase the ability of drivers and riders to avoid the situations that lead to those crashes in the first place. That means bikes, cars and other vehicles talking to each other and the road, thereby making actual collisions almost obsolete. These latest, fourth generation, Honda Advanced Safety Vehicles push the limits of current technology to explore what might be possible in a totally integrated future.
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In the past, the vision of the future went like a car saying "Hey, here I am, don't hit me" and a bike being like, "it's cool dude, I wasn't gonna." Then a streetlamp would chime in, "hey, I'm right here, don't hit me either." Basically, vehicles and obstacles would communicate positions and trajectories to ensure the two didn't intersect. The problem being both that a vehicle's direction is neither constant nor guaranteed and the massive amount of data needed to determine and forecast a vehicle's future location.

Now, Honda's system envisions using hyper-local traffic monitoring to more precisely place vehicles on the road. So, if a bike is filtering between two lanes of traffic, street-mounted sensors can see that and warn cars not to turn into it. The solution is both lower tech and, as a result, more realistic. It also relies on drivers, not vehicles to heed the warnings.

In the scooter's case (this could just as effectively be a motorcycle) a dash mounted display highlights the position of impending collisions. We bet this is really annoying while splitting lanes of traffic at high speed.

This Forza also represents the latest development in Honda's idea of giving two-wheelers recognizable, animal-like faces that should be more immediately recognizable for idiot car drivers. Note not only the happy-go-lucky face described by the headlights and fairing, but also the mirror and fairing-mounted LEDs.

We really like the idea of future cars communicating with each other and the road to reduce the capacity of completely inept drivers to kill each other. But we also look forward to the increased autonomy non-integrated motorcycles will afford in such an overly-controlled environment.

Honda