News and Views

We just bought a new car for Gisele, a 2016 Honda Accord. You’ve all seen Accords before, so not much to talk about design-wise, but there are some interesting high tech features.

1) Engine and Road Noise Cancelling — There are microphones that detect the noise in the cabin and use the sound system speakers to generate cancelling sound waves to reduce the noise level. The car is very quiet, which is about all I can say.

2) Adaptive Cruise Control — I first encountered this on my 2011 Acura MDX, and loved it for highway cruising. Set the cruise control, and if you get too close to the car in front you will slow down and keep a safe distance. Makes highway cruising more relaxing.

3) Forward Collision Warning — Audible and visual warnings if the car detects you are approaching an obstacle too quickly. The next related item is much cooler.

4) Collision Mitigation Braking System — Also on my MDX. If the front radar detects that you are approaching an obstacle too quickly, it will apply brakes to slow you down and stop if necessary. I “sort-of” tried it on my MDX a few times, and it seems to work well. I think Honda would call it Collision Prevention System, but obviously it’s not going to work perfectly every time, especially if someone pulls in front of you suddenly, or you swerve into an obstacle at the last minute. So for legal purposes it is only “collision mitigation”.

5) Lane Watch — This is becoming pretty standard on a lot of newer cars — the system watches the line markings on the road and if it detects that you are moving out of your lane without using a turn signal, the car will audibly and visually warn you. Kind of cool, but the next item is even cooler.

6) Lane Keeping Assist System– The car will actively turn the steering wheel to keep you centered in the lane. It’s a little like Tesla’s new self-driving feature, but Tesla’s system is a lot more reliable, taking fairly sharp curves and accepting gaps in the lane markings. With Honda’s system there have to be markers on both side (painted lines or raised bumps), and the road can’t have any sharp curves. And if the system detects that you haven’t manually moved the steering wheel in the last 15 seconds, it will get upset and insist that you take control. They call it a safety feature, not self driving. Still, it’s pretty cool and a sign of the inevitable progression to completely self driving cars.

7) Road Departure Mitigation — Really just a subset of Active Lane Keeping that it is always enabled unless you turn it off (over 45 MPH). If you start to drift off the right side of the road without a turn signal, it will alarm and gently pull you back on the road.

8) Blind Spot Camera — When you turn on the right turn signal, the display in the dash shows the camera view on the right side of the car with lines indicating how far behind are the cars that you see. I’m not sure if I like this as well as the simple blind spot light on my MDX that would illuminate if there was a vehicle in the blind spot. That was idiot proof at a glance, whereas with the camera you have to comprehend what you are seeing. We’ll see how well it works.

9) Android Auto (or Apple Auto for Ken) — You can connect your smartphone and use many of the apps right on the car’s screen. We actually haven’t played with this much yet. I’m not sure how convenient it is and Gisele still has too much to learn with the other features. We may look at it in the future. Closely related is “Aha”, which is supposed to convert text to speech of your Facebook entries and Tweets, and also play internet radio stations you select. We haven’t tried this yet either; reviews are pretty negative anyway.

10) Eternal Traffic Monitoring — With our past couple of cars, the navigation system would show traffic conditions for three months until the Sirius satellite radio free trial expired, and then it went away. Honda includes a lifetime subscription to traffic updates that display on the navigation map, showing slow or stopped traffic, accidents and roadwork. I think they realized that Google provides a similar service for free, so people are going to be less likely to pay for it anyway. We haven’t tried it enough to know how up to date the information is.

There’s all the other, usual stuff such as back up camera, electronic vehicle stability of course.

Cars have changed a lot in the past 20 years! All this high-tech stuff that used to be only found on high-end vehicles at a large premium is now trickling down to mainstream cars. Hopefully the increased insurance premium because of the added cost of these features will be offset by a reduction in insurance premium because they should make the driver safer.

Will playing with the active steering cause more accidents than it will prevent? Will drivers pay less attention with a false sense of security? Will the bored driver fall asleep and then miss that sharp curve that the system couldn’t handle?

Will it stop you if you determinedly accelerate toward a block wall? I hope so!