Honda app can sense traffic jams before they hit

During a test in Indonesia, the smartphone application increased average vehicle speeds and fuel economy in heavy traffic.

by Clifford Atiyeh of www.msn.com auto's section

Honda has a smartphone application it says can predict traffic congestion and help prevent drivers from causing bottlenecks.

We've all experienced bottlenecks -- so named after the curves of the glass Coke bottle -- due to rapid slowdowns in a certain spot that cause traffic to build up steadily from behind, whereas in front it's relatively free-flowing.

Honda's smartphone app monitors the patterns of a driver's acceleration and deceleration over time and then predicts if a certain pattern, such as heavy braking, is likely to cause a traffic jam. It then coaches the driver with colors, just as many Hondas do on the instrument panel for achieving the best fuel economy, with the goal of smoothing out abrupt acceleration and braking.

Often, drivers leave little space between vehicles on congested roadways, which causes spikes in speed --  a main condition for those annoying bottlenecks.

Honda tested the app in Jakarta, Indonesia, between September and February on both a single car and as a cloud-connected network of cars running the same app. With just one car running the app, traffic jams were delayed by an average of three minutes and changes in the average speed were reduced by 60 percent. More importantly, fuel economy was improved by 20 percent. When connected to the cloud, congestion was delayed by an average of four minutes, speed changes were reduced by 70 percent and fuel economy went up 22 percent.

While many cars feature live traffic alerts and can overlay navigation maps with color-coded lines that show how fast traffic is moving on a certain route, no production system exists to stop traffic before it starts. Of course, Honda's system can't eliminate traffic -- anyone who's been to Mexico City, Mumbai or any crowded city knows that's impossible -- but friendly in-car reminders could at least dull some of the pain.

The app is not yet available, but Honda said it would eventually embed the system on future models, including a special version for its motorcycles that could send vibrating alerts to the rider.

Source;
http://editorial.autos.msn.com/blogs/autosblogpost.aspx?post=2f410e99-6239-4d5f-82f7-d28ef21d4743