GoMentum Station, a 5,000-acre facility, is the largest secure test-bed of its kind, located at the CNWS. The CNWS was officially closed in 2007 and is currently in the process of being transferred to the City of Concord. GoMentum Station contains 20-miles of paved, city-like roadway grids, buildings and other urban infrastructure, providing a realistic environment that will help accelerate the development of automated and connected vehicle technologies. The public will not have access to the test-bed site, and the automated vehicle testing will be restricted to GoMentum Station.

Honda will leverage modified versions of Acura’s flagship RLX sedan for development and testing at GoMentum Station. New, prototype sensors and cameras added to the vehicle will work hand-in hand with the extensive array of forward, reverse and corner sensors that enable a suite of AcuraWatch safety and driver assistive technologies on the production RLX.

Honda is building its automated and connected car technology portfolio, while bringing industry-leading capabilities to current generation vehicles. In September 2014, the company demonstrated several of its latest innovations, including a vehicle capable of automated freeway merging, exiting and lane changing, as well as a unique vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) “virtual tow” capability for assisting a driver in distress, at the ITS World Congress in Detroit. (Earlier post.)

Honda is also broadly deploying advanced driver-assist and early-stage automated driving technologies in current vehicles that help improve drivers’ situational awareness, such as Lane Departure Warning, Forward Collision Warning, Adaptive Cruise Control with Low-Speed Follow, Collision Mitigation Braking System and Road Departure Mitigation. Honda will offer rearview cameras as standard equipment on all model year 2015 Honda and Acura vehicles.

Complementing this new effort in Northern California, Honda is also a founding partner in the University of Michigan’s Mobility Transformation Center (MTC), a major public-private R&D initiative that aims to lay the foundation for a commercially viable system of connected and automated vehicles, including the implementation of a working system in Ann Arbor by 2021.