What is Honda V to X?

Walking into a Honda dealership like Keyes Honda is a bit like being immersed in alphabet soup. Sometimes even your Honda dealer gets confused keeping all the acronyms straight, and now there’s another one to add to the list. It’s called V to X, and it could make your future drive much safer.

V to X is short for Vehicle to Everything. It’s a communications protocol that lets a car communicate with its environment and vice versa. We’ve seen glimpses of this already with apps and smart devices, but a new project near the Honda plant in Marysville, OH aims to take this to another level — all in the name of vehicle safety.

Existing Honda Sensing safety tech relies on cameras and LIDAR to “read” and image a car’s surroundings, using onboard processing power to identify and respond to potential threats. That’s the short version of active safety features like active cruise control and collision mitigation braking.

What V to X does differently is externalize the technology and the processing power. It doesn’t replace or supplant Honda Sensing. It is, instead, a way of augmenting the way in which your car reads and reacts to its environment. A series of cameras (which, right now, is deployed at only one Marysville intersection) monitors an intersection in all directions, identifying hazards ranging from emergency vehicles to cars, bikes, and pedestrians — before they register on your active safety system, and long before you see them. A warning is then sent to the HUD (heads-up display) in an appropriately-equipped Honda Pilot or other Honda vehicle.

Even if this technology never comes to market in its present form, the research will still have value; you can bet that the Honda Motor Company will find ways to incorporate what they’ve learned into future Honda vehicles to make them safer. To see what they’ve already done on that front — or how to get the most out of your new Honda model — visit Keys Honda at 5355 Van Nuys Blvd in Van Nuys, CA today.