What's all this about?
Honda has developed an Intelligent Adaptive Cruise Control (i-ACC) system for its top-ranking European-spec CR-V models.
Sounds interesting. What's so intelligent about it?
Current ACC set-ups, that are pretty smooth most of the time, aren't very good at reacting when a car suddenly moves into your lane in front of you. They tend to need the whole car to be in your lane before they decide to apply the brakes, leading to quite severe deceleration; not good for queasy passengers or the moron who's tailgating you. Honda's i-ACC, on the other hand, can predict when a car ahead is about to move into your lane, applying the brakes earlier and in a more gentle fashion to prevent last-minute anchor-on manoeuvres, thus making adaptive cruise control smoother than ever.
How does it achieve this?
It uses a camera and radar, just the same as every other ACC system, but it also applies an algorithm to any neighbouring cars it can sense to determine if they're likely to move into your lane. It is apparently so prescient it can spot any such lane-drifting nonsense up to five seconds before it actually happens.
Does it need recalibrating for left- and right-hand drive roads?
Nope, the jointly-developed system (a collaboration between Honda Europe and Honda Japan) knows which side of the road you are on and automatically prioritises the cars most likely to cut you up accordingly. Honda says this is 'predictive safety', presumably a step beyond active safety.
Will it be on all CR-Vs?
At the moment, it is only confirmed for the top-spec cars but you can imagine it spreading to other models sooner rather than later, probably as an option at first.
Matt Robinson - 9 Jan 2015