/ 10 August 2011

Back to the future

<b>Sukasha Singh</b> gets in touch with her inner crash test dummy in the newly upgraded Honda Accord.

It was a decidedly odd sensation, intensified by the fact that what we were doing was more than a little dangerous.

We were both nervous. Really nervous, but we had to be. A blasé approach to something as risky as this would have gotten us both into serious trouble, so we sat rigidly upright — a great deal more tense than we would normally be on the average test-drive — and then he slipped his hands off the steering wheel.

I wasn’t scared and neither was he, but there was the unmistakeable, almost musky whiff of tension in the air. I could sense the warm blood rising in my face and I knew I was perspiring despite the aircon blowing out a chilly 19° breeze.

But we just had to try it out so we decided to bide our time, waiting for the least hazardous stretch of road and when there weren’t any cars around — and we did it.

Sounds like the introduction to a cheesy B-grade wham-bam-thank-you-ma’m novel, doesn’t it? But I promise it’s far more interesting than that. Perhaps not for those who enjoy those oversexed paperbacks about undernourished damsels being swept off their feet by monosyllabic bouncers.

But I digress. Back to my co-driver taking his hands off the wheel.

We were on a test-drive in the splendidly upgraded Honda Accord, which has a raft of futuristic safety features that were begging to be tested. One of the new exceptional features, which we were testing, has the decidedly unsexy tag of Lane Keeping Assist System (LKAS).

In a select few vehicles made by other manufacturers a lane keeping assist feature will beep furiously when the wheels drift over a line without the indicator being activated. In other cars, warning lights will flash in the side mirrors while the steering wheel may even vibrate to warn you that you’re drifting into another lane.

Of course, this feature could be so much more than just another safety feature. It could even be a “civility feature”, which forces people to indicate when they’re changing lanes. If only. Alas, you can switch most lane keeping assist programs off and change lanes without ever indicating your intentions.

But the Accord isn’t content to simply replicate other lane keeping assist features. No siree. Honda turned this system on its head and developed LKAS, which will not only give you an audible and visual warning about the car drifting into another lane but will also self-steer the car safely back into the lane. It’s like an auto-pilot feature that kicks in when you most need it and, of course, we had to do a real-world test.

We were on a deserted road outside Cape Town with the system activated and we were coming up to quite a sharp curve in the road at about 90kph. When my co-driver took his hands of the steering wheel, the feature worked exactly as it promised and after beeping furiously it steered itself back into the lane just as the front right wheel started drifting over the line. We also had the adaptive cruise control activated, which meant that for a few minutes he didn’t accelerate or steer. The Accord did it all.

Being a youngish geek, he was naturally chuffed about the whole experience and quickly pulled off so that I could give it a try.

Honda execs told us that we had to have at least one hand on the steering wheel for the system to work but we both experienced that the car would steer itself even when there was absolutely no pressure being applied to the steering wheel.

Using cameras in the windscreen as well as radar sensors, the Accord is able to gauge where the lanes are and keeps itself perfectly between the lines until you start steering the car yourself.
It was indeed a strange experience seeing the steering wheel move on its own while watching it correct itself so that it didn’t stray over the line on the left and the escapade left us feeling nothing short of reverential about a run-of-the-mill family sedan that was clearly anything but run of the mill.

Of course, I have driven cars that can park themselves. There are a few on the market, which use similar sensors and will even parallel park perfectly into tight spaces, but a car practically driving itself at high speed is quite different.

The only aspect that bugged me a little is that the cameras and sensors should be a little more sensitive to road markings as there were times when the system could not be activated because the sensors weren’t able to detect the lanes. Then again, the Road Traffic Management Corporation could also do a better job of ensuring that especially highway lanes are clearly marked.

One of the other features debuting on this upgraded model is the Collision Mitigation Braking System (CMBS) for which Honda received a special advanced award from Euro NCAP — the European safety authority, which rates all cars in Europe. According to research done by Honda, if all cars in Europe were fitted with CMBS, 250 000 accidents could be avoided each year.

We also tested CMBS, but this test thankfully happened at a small airfield because simulating a crash is best done in safe surroundings.

CMBS uses radar technology to constantly assess the distance between the Accord and the obstacles around the car, particularly the vehicle in front of you. If you’re closing in on the car in front at high speed, CMBS will sound an alert and if that doesn’t grab your attention, it will tug your seatbelt three times to warn you that you’re about to crash. If you still haven’t applied the brakes, it will use up to 80% of the brakeforce in an attempt to stop the car.

We did indeed test this and again, the system worked exactly as it should. However while I was thoroughly impressed by the fantastic technologies on offer, I was tiring of my stint as a crash test dummy.

Of course no one crashed during any of the tests but speeding up to a car and not braking in order to see if a safety system works is more than a little unnerving. But I put my life on the line for you, dear reader, so that you would know that all these new safety gizmos work just fine.

There are quite a few other features in the facelifted Accord but the new safety systems are by far the most impressive.

The regular Accord without all the new gadgets is an accomplished enough mid-size sedan, which has always been severely under-rated. Hopefully, these new features will drive home the point that while the Accord can be a little pricey (the top-of-the-range 2.4-litre automatic Accord costs R431 200), you won’t get these advanced components on any other car for this price.