kansaiwalker1

October 30, 2003

Honda Says Its Cars Will Be Among Safest

By DANNY HAKIM

AYMOND, Ohio, Oct. 29 - Honda announced on Wednesday an ambitious plan to make its vehicles among the safest on the road.

The company's executives said that several advanced safety technologies that are currently offered as options would become standard equipment on Honda vehicles as well as those made by its Acura division.

Many of the technologies are aimed at addressing the dangers posed by the light truck class of vehicles, which includes sport utilities, pickup trucks and minivans.

"We are determined to say that large vehicles and small vehicles can coexist on the road," said Charles Baker, a vice president for research at Honda.

The company's plan reinforces Honda's somewhat iconoclastic role in the industry, in part because it gives attention to an area that has been long neglected in this country: pedestrian safety. While some manufacturers have espoused a bigger-is-always-better safety philosophy, Honda, which does not sell pickup trucks or the biggest S.U.V.'s, has emphasized design and engineering.

"We do not agree with people who say you can only have safety in an expensive car or a big car," Mr. Baker said. "We are different from our competitors in that respect."

Honda said it would try to offset at least some of the cost of the added safety features by increasing efficiency in other areas.

Within three years, the company said, side air bags and antilock brakes will come standard on nearly all Hondas and Acuras. The side air bag system will include bags that descend like curtains from the roof, protecting the heads of occupants in all seats.

Its light trucks will also be equipped with electronic stability systems intended to prevent rollovers, as well as sensors that keep airbags inflated while a vehicle is rolling.

Rollovers have been a subject of particular attention because light trucks are significantly less stable than cars. Last year, more than 10,000 Americans died in rollover-related accidents.

Stability systems are offered only sporadically as standard equipment, and generally only on luxury vehicles like the light trucks made by Acura or the Cadillac brand from General Motors. Toyota offers such systems as standard on all of its 2004 S.U.V.'s. They are more often standard items on German vehicles.

Honda said it also planned to redesign the front ends of its cars and trucks by the end of the decade, replacing two steel rails that sit horizontally under the engine with a rail system that wraps horizontally and vertically around the front.

The goal is to make Honda's light trucks less dangerous because they will strike other vehicles with less concentrated force. For cars like the Civic, the system will absorb crash energy more efficiently, to help preserve the passenger compartment.

Experts and regulators have been grappling with the safety risks related to the changing population of vehicles in the United States, with light trucks now more than half of the sales today compared with a fifth in 1980.

Under pressure from the auto safety regulators in the Bush administration, companies have been working jointly to develop new standards aimed at reducing the dangers posed by S.U.V.'s and pickups when they collide with cars. Honda's announcement appears to be an aggressive approach to the issue ahead of the industry's agreement, which is expected in December.

"They're socializing the S.U.V. so that they are not clobbering and damaging other cars that have a right to be on the road," said R. David Pittle, senior vice president for technical policy at Consumers Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports.

The company announced its plans at its new crash test center here, in rural Ohio, its first such site in North America. Honda demonstrated crash tests that were both typical and quite unusual, including using a hydraulic cannon to shoot a crash-test dummy's head at the hood of an S.U.V. at 25 miles an hour to see how a person might be injured.

Honda executives said the company had redesigned the hood and other parts of seven models that are already on the road. The safety of pedestrians hit by cars has received scant attention in the United States, even though about 5,000 pedestrians are killed by cars in the country each year. Both Japan and Europe are planning regulations aimed at reducing pedestrian injuries by 2005, but the United States has no such plans.

"While the subject of pedestrian safety may not be top of mind for our customers or the public in general, it is no less important to our concept of providing safety for everyone," said Dan Bonawitz, vice president for corporate planning and logistics for American Honda.