Honda is on the road to developing connected vehicle technology for its future cars, like many other auto companies. Today it has shown how some of these technologies will help us and explains how the transition to 5G technology will take it further.
The video at the top of this post shows the best of what Honda is trying to do. It illustrates three different scenarios where Mobile Vehicle-to-All (C-V2X) communications will come in handy and potentially save lives. Honda says it relies on Verizon’s 5G network (we’ll note here that Autoblog is part of the Verizon Media group of media companies, but the relationship won’t affect our coverage) to test its technology at the Mcity of the University of Michigan, which is a dedicated testing area for future connected and autonomous vehicles.
A pedestrian scenario is the first test shown. It simulates a situation where a pedestrian enters the street at an intersection that is blind to the driver. Using cameras mounted at the intersection, the infrastructure is able to send a warning message to the driver’s instrument panel in the connected car that a pedestrian is about to enter the street before they even get there. put one foot in.
All of this should be done in the blink of an eye, which is why they are using 5G and new mobile edge computing (MEC). Honda says the use of 5G and MEC is an improvement as it reduces the need for on-board artificial intelligence that would otherwise be needed for the car to communicate with other vehicles or infrastructure. 5G is also extremely fast.
The second example given by Honda is a warning for incoming emergency vehicles. An emergency vehicle coming from behind can send a signal forward that other drivers will see in their dashboard so they can drive and make room for the emergency vehicles. Finally, the car can warn you in advance that someone at your intersection is driving through a red light. With the help of data from cameras, the infrastructure can send a signal to all vehicles that someone in the vicinity is driving a red light at the light.
“Honda’s research collaboration with Verizon is an important step in our multi-year effort to develop connected vehicle safety technology to realize our vision for a collision-free society,” said Ehsan Moradi Pari, Ph.D, research group leader at Honda’s Advanced Technology Research Division. “Although the study is preliminary and not intended as a product feature at this time, vehicle communications using 5G and MEC have the potential to improve safety for everyone sharing the road.”
We wish we could give you some sort of perspective for when this technology will make its way into Honda vehicles, but it’s still clearly in a research and development phase. Honda says it has been working on the C-V2X since 2017 under the SAFE SWARM initiative. We can hope that this technology will soon find its way to cars and help reduce road fatalities and accidents.
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