By Tessa R. Salazar
Inquirer
HE isn’t just swift. He’s precise. And wouldn’t we wish we were a bit just like him in our everyday struggles in the chaotic streets of Metro Manila.
His name, fittingly so, is Russ Swift, and he is a world-class precision driver and Guinness record holder. Russ can execute the tightest J turns and parallel park in the blink of an eye. He can spin a car into a parking space just 33 cm longer than the vehicle.
At the Honda Automobile R&D center in Tochigi, each of the automotive writers present didn’t dare do a Swift-like parking maneuver. Instead, they did somewhat the opposite: park a vehicle equipped with a park assist system with computer-assisted steering and voice guidance, which effectively takes the guesswork out of parking.
Parallel-assist parking
Here’s how the “spoon-fed” parallel-assist parking works. Stop on the nose of the parked rear vehicle when it is aligned with the indicator on the left front door lining. Then turn on the parallel-assist switch.
The driver moves the car slowly forward until the voice guide asks him or her to stop the car.
While backing, the driver is asked to keep the position of the steering wheel. The voice guide will tell the driver when to stop. He or she is then asked to turn the steering wheel into the center position to make the precise position in backing the car. Voila!
This same program also does reverse parking. And this does away with an expensive rear monitor. Such technologies have been at use already in many Honda cars in Japan. This system would not be introduced in the Philippines in the near future.
Glow in the dark
Though it does look like a ghost glowing in the dark, it’s actually a living, breathing pedestrian reflected in front of a car in the dead of night. By reflecting images obtained from two far infrared cameras positioned in the lower section of the front bumper in the heads up display, this visibility safety system introduced in the Japanese car Legend in 2004 supports the driver’s night-time vision. When the system detects pedestrians, it cautions the driver via an audio warning and visual enhancement frame.
Journalists were then brought to the world’s first indoor, omni-directional real-world crash test facility in the Tochigi R&D center that Honda built in 2000.
Here, scribes were able to witness an actual head-on collision between a CR-V and an Accord (complete with crash test dummies) at 60 kph. Ugh! Even for crash-test dummies, the postcrash details are quite gory but suffice to say, based on the tests, the occupants will survive albeit with some injuries. One crash was enough, though. The facility also conducts collision tests between vehicles at various angles, in addition to fixed barrier tests.
Crash dummy
Honda has even developed a pedestrian crash dummy that reproduces the kinetics of the human body during car-to-pedestrian collisions to identify the parts of the car body most often involved in the infliction of injuries.
And we have to thank this hapless dummy for making it possible for the carmaker to introduce recent safety designs such as the pop-up hood and the pedestrian injury reduction body to reduce head injuries during collisions.
Actuators “pop up” the rear portion of the engine hood at approximately 10 cm when three sensors located in the front bumper and a vehicle speed sensor determine a collision with a pedestrian has occurred. This provides a space between the rigid engine components and the hood, reducing head injuries to pedestrians. Again, this technology had been first incorporated in the Legend that is being sold in Europe.
Bikers’ airbags
Motorcyclists plunging face first into airbags? Sounds loony, but it may help save countless lives. And yes, Honda is taking this seriously and has developed the world’s first airbag system for mass production in motorcycles, and can help lessen the severity of head injuries caused by motorcycle frontal collisions.
Airbag-equipped motorcycles have been on sale in the United States since September 2006, in Europe in October 2006 and in Japan in June 2007.
WAS it just coincidence that as the Inquirer flashed the news about climate change on its banner page, its Motoring section had in its possession (for a couple of days, at least) two hybrid cars from two of the world’s trailblazers in hybrid power technology?
