Resisting the temptation to stay off the brake pedal is a tough call when you are nano- seconds away from impact, but that’s exactly what drivers of the new Honda Inspire can afford to do thanks to the radar-based CMS (Collision Mitigation Brake System). CMS aims to help drivers avoid rear-end collisions and is just one of the many new products Honda is investing in, some now, some in near future and some in the distant future. Jesse Crosse reports.
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Given the recent rumblings about Honda’s performance on the domestic market, it’s perhaps a touch ironic that in CMS and also HIDS (Honda Intelligent Driver Support) it has succeeded in bringing technologies to the Japanese market that the biggest European manufacturers have only managed to demonstrate as rudimentary prototypes.
CMS
CMS is a baffling acronym for what is actually a simple enough function – preventing you from running into the car in front. A brief test at Honda’s proving ground at Tochigi was proof enough just how serious a technology it is. Chasing down a polystyrene target dangling from a boom attached to an MPV moving at 50km/h was alarming enough and despite being a lot smaller than a car, CMS’s 75Ghz radar sensors picked up the metre square panel and went into action. It had been monitoring the speed at which we were closing from a distance of 100 metres and had been keeping a watchful eye on events. It was also monitoring the host vehicle’s dynamics through yaw rate, steering angle, wheel speed and brake pressure, continually assessing the possibility of a crash. When it decides a collision is likely, CMS brings its E-Pretensioner in to play tweaking at the driver’s shoulder with the seatbelt, sounding a buzzer and illuminating a ‘brake’ light in the instrument binnacle. Should the driver ignore all that, then CMS persists, its E-Pretensioner tugging two or three times more and applying light braking. Should the driver wake up to the danger at that stage and hit the brakes, CMS lends support with a brake assist function. If the driver fails to respond altogether, however, CMS goes into the third and final stage which is ‘collision damage reduction’ when the belt retracts fully and the brakes are applied to provide anything up to a 0.6g brake force.
HIDS
HIDS, might sound like a head-up display but in fact stands for Honda Intelligent Driver Support and combines two discreet technologies, LKAS (Lane-Keeping Assist System) and IHCC (Intelligent Highway Cruise Control). The first is a lane departure system which warns the driver he is wandering off course and intervenes by steering the car back on track. The second is an adaptive cruise control system. LKAS is a remarkable achievement and something even the likes of BMW, Mercedes and Fiat, all of whom have provided prototypes to the press for testing in the past, have yet to bring to market in Europe despite years of research.
Allow the Inspire to wander of course around Tochigi’s high speed banked circuit and HIDS sounds a warning before gently but firmly intervening through the electric power steering system to bring the car back into line. Let go of the steering wheel for more than a few seconds, however, and HIDS will work out you are showing-off to friends, sound another warning, then turn itself off. Like most similar systems, HIDS relies on video cameras, in this case positioned either side of the rear view mirror on the inside of the windscreen. An image processor and logic systems interpret the stereo video signals then translate those into action.
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The Inspire is actually something of a showcase for Honda technology because apart from these two advanced safety systems it also has an advanced powertrain. A new V6 3.0-litre i-VTEC (‘i’ is for intelligent) is equipped with Honda’s Variable Cylinder Management System which cuts three cylinders when low power output is called for. Vehicle and engine speed, as well as throttle position are all monitored and if the conditions are right, the rear bank of cylinders are shut down by closing valves and switching off the injectors, effectively converting the engine to an in-line three-cylinder unit. Closing the valves means the engine still has to work against compression, but the energy used is mostly recovered through the spring-like effect of the compressed air in each cylinder helping the piston on its next downward stroke.
As a result of periodically sealing the three dormant cylinders when they are not needed, pumping losses are reduced by 65 percent and overall fuel consumption on the Japanese 10-15 mode falls to11.6km/100km (24.35 Imperial mpg). At the same time, maximum power is 250PS and torque, 296Nm. Despite the three-cylinder mode, refinement never suffers, thanks to some advanced electronics originally developed by Lotus Engineering in partnership with Southampton University in the late 1980s. Front and rear engine mounts are hydraulic and actively controlled to cancel out any vibration. Electronics measure the fluctuation in the crankshaft rotation speed and compresses and extends a hydraulic actuator in each mount in the same phase and period.
Active noise control
Active noise control works in a similar way on the occupants’ ears by generating sound in opposite phase to that produced by the engine when three cylinders are idling. The engine sound is monitored inside the car by a microphone, analysed and a cancelling signal emitted from the audio speakers. Active noise control research was originally prompted at Southampton for use in aircraft cabins, but its use in the Inspire has produced a level of refinement that beggars belief.
Crash compatibility body frame structure
When it comes to crash safety, like most manufacturers, Honda has to try and stay one step ahead of the game. In particular, it has been working on crash ‘compatibility’ between vehicles of different size and weight through a development of its existing ‘G-Control’ collision safety body technology. The new approach is dubbed ‘crash compatibility body frame structure’ and is said to appear for the first time in the new Life city car. That said, Honda demonstrated the effectiveness of the Fit (Jazz in Europe) structure against a Legend sedan prior to the Tokyo Show two years ago and the concepts look similar. The Life has a frame structure which disperses the force of an impact by dissipating energy over a wider area than the immediate point of impact. The design consists of an energy-absorbing main frame, a bulkhead that absorbs energy from the collision and a lower component designed to provide rigidity for the crash frame and prevent both vertical and lateral misalignment during impact.
Prior to Tokyo this year, Honda re-enacted the offset crash of two years ago, this time substituting the Jazz for the Life in a showdown with a Legend weighing nearly two tonnes. Honda claims the collision energy absorption of the Life’s engine compartment has been improved by 50 percent and the load on the passenger compartment by 30 percent. One observer at the event made the cynical point that improving absorption by 50 percent over the previous Life wouldn’t take much – so flimsy was its construction. But in this severe impact, the new car stood up well, although the driver would clearly still have suffered some lower leg injury. The Life also rebounded so violently from the bigger car that it came to rest pointing in the opposite direction. Despite that, engineers on the spot were confident the physical shock experienced by the occupants would still be drastically reduced by the new crash frame.
IMAS
So much for the here and now, but Honda is also remaining aggressive on the hybrid front and the significance of its announcement at Tokyo of the IMAS, a minimalist successor to the Insight, should be lost on no one. For a while, it looked as though Honda had gained a big advantage over competitors Toyota, by launching the Civic IMA last year, a hybrid based on a series production platform rather than a specialised architecture such as the Prius. Toyota has said its full hybrid powertrains are so fundamentally different that they could not be accommodated inside a series production car. But Honda’s mild hybrid IMA system (Integrated Motor Assist) is not dissimilar in concept to a flywheel-mounted starter alternator and therefore can quite easily fit in place of a traditional powertrain. However, one senior Honda designer says he now believes it is necessary for hybrids to appear different – simply to better capture the imagination of the public. That philosophy paves the way for much more specialised hybrids and there’s a possibility of seeing high performance versions emerging from Honda in the future.
Fuel cells
Honda is also setting the pace in fuel cell design. Fuel cell stacks are currently made on a hand-built basis using exotic materials such as the carbon-resin compound used for separator plates. In the new Honda stack, the plates are manufactured from stamped metal and a new type of aromatic electrolyte membrane replaces the usual fluorine-based polymer types allowing start-up from temperatures as low as -20°C. In total, there are 50 percent fewer components in the Honda stack and in the latest FCX fuel cell car (effectively version five of the FCX range) the stack has twice the energy density of the FCX-V3 still current just over two years ago.
Honda was slow to embrace common rail diesel technology but the new Accord diesel has won friends among road testers for its power and refinement. The launch of CMS and HIDs, albeit only on the domestic market, also demonstrates how technically capable this manufacturer is compared to the combined might of Germany and Detroit. The same is true of fuel cell technology, the latest stack possibly representing the revolution in stack design many said would never happen. There’s little doubt that Honda’s technological spectrum is both wide and colourful and that in terms of intellectual property at least, it’s right up there with the best of them. The challenge it will face over the next 10 years, however, is to maintain that inertia and successfully convert those assets into tangible products fit for an increasingly demanding global market place.
