Honda Rethinks the Intersection

Pacific Honda has served the San Diego area long enough to see a lot of changes in the new Honda cars we sell. Once-advanced technologies like airbags are now commonplace, with the really exciting developments taking place in active safety features. There’s a new one just over the horizon that could make your daily drive even safer still.

It’s called V to X, and it’s short for Vehicle to Everything. It’s loosely based on the same technology that lets your phone and your car “talk” to each other, but a new partnership among the Honda Motor Company, the state of Ohio, and the small town of Marysville, OH (home to a major Honda manufacturing plant) is taking it to another level.

If you know Honda cars, you know that your late-model Honda Civic or Honda Pilot already has active safety features built in. Using LIDAR and cameras, they image the vehicle’s environment and let it respond to surrounding hazards. Those systems can “see” more, and react faster, than their human drivers sometimes can, but even they have those limits.

V to X removes those line-of-sight limitations by putting the safety tech outside the car. Using a series of cameras strategically placed in an intersection, the system detects oncoming pedestrians, bikes, and cars and sends a warning to appropriately-equipped cars’ heads-up displays so the driver can be on the lookout.

Scaling this to commercial use may be some way off — it’s tech-intensive, expensive, and would require industry standards and extensive cooperation from municipalities. That said, it’s a safe bet that this research — much like the research into self-driving cars — will yield safety dividends whether or not it ever makes its way to the market.

In the meantime, you can see some great safety technology in new Honda SUVs, cars, and trucks, whether in your own driveway or right here at your San Diego Honda dealership. Visit Pacific Honda at 4761 Convoy St. in San Diego, CA or call 858-694-1000 to find out more!