Honda's all-round approach to safety

The crash test facility at Honda's R&D facility in Tochigi, Japan, resembles something out of a science fiction film. It's quiet and dark inside, until someone switches on the huge spot lights. Multiple cameras monitor the action from different angles – including through a transparent panel under the floor, where the cars collide – and there's a large control room, glassed in on all sides, hanging from the roof of the two-storey facility. It's huge and disconcertingly clean and tidy. Engineers and technicians run around the place in white uniforms and baseball caps.

Capable of running a 'real world' car-to-car crash test – through any sort of angle – the facility was opened 15 years ago.

"Honda was the first in the world to build an omnidirectional facility in 2000," says Koichi Kamiji, Senior Chief Engineer at Honda R&D.

For journalists attending the facility, Honda has set up a demonstration, crashing a Fit (which we know as the Jazz) into a CR-V on a partial offset approach. The CR-V travels forward slowly, with the Fit bearing down on the SUV at high speed.

The boom as the two cars meet is enormous. It's easy to forget just how violent such a collision can be, after a diet of action films or NASCAR races, but all that kinetic energy has to be converted into something. The 'something' is mostly sound.

After the impact – and some cleaning up of debris around the two cars – we're allowed to walk out on the floor and look closely at the two vehicles. Very little can be salvaged, we're told. At an impact speed of 50km/h, the two cars are subjected to 100g forces, which can scramble even the most robust engine parts, for instance.

And just in case you're wondering, that force (100g) is also sustained by the heads of the dummies in the cars. Honda is well aware that the dummies must replicate the human experience in a crash as far as possible. The dummies used by Honda now represent the 50-percentile American male, meaning that they're physically larger and heavier than the dummies the manufacturer used in the past. Each one costs six million yen (over $68,000 AUD) – before fitting accelerometers and other sensors.

Honda has also developed a dummy to test pedestrian safety. Named the Polar III (the third in the series), the dummy measures 175cm in height and weighs 75kg – the 50-percentile American male parameters once more. Polar III is so sophisticated, it even measures loads on ligaments during a crash.

Perhaps the need for Polar III will decline in years to come, as cars become better at avoiding crashes and keeping pedestrians safer. Honda's driver-assist systems – bundled together as Honda SENSING – rely on a high-resolution monocular camera that can recognise pedestrians and a 77GHz millimetre-wave radar. But while people get blotto and walk home rather than drive, or while small children go chasing balls onto roads, Honda will persist with its pedestrian safety R&D programme.