New Gold Wing Nav Technology

Honda has filed patents that indicate that it’s working on sophisticated rider aids that can take things like weather into account and come up with alternate routes.

There’s no doubt now that Honda is hard at work on a next-generation Gold Wing that will debut a host of new technologies as it reestablishes its position as the most high-tech tourer on the planet. Several new patents from the firm show it could get a navigation system that accounts for weather conditions and can reroute you or adapt the bike to suit.

Over the last couple of years, Honda has filed dozens of patents that appear to relate to the Gold Wing. These have been largely related to safety, with several documents illustrating how the bike is likely to debut Honda’s take on the idea of on-board radar, and others showing that it could even get a steering-assistance system to help dodge danger. Now, with several rival brands already offering radar-based adaptive cruise control and collision mitigation systems, Honda is under pressure to show that the Wing is still at the top of the tree when it comes to tech.

The firm’s latest patents also appear to be Gold Wing–related but this time they show a system that could easily be spread to other Hondas or even adopted, at least in part, as an app-based system for smartphones. They revolve around an advanced navigation system, specifically for motorcycles, which takes weather into account and can potentially use data from the vast number of Honda cars on the road to make riding safer, more comfortable, and more convenient.

Honda has prided itself on being a technology leader, but other companies have already implemented features like radar-based adaptive cruise control. Will it take the next steps with new technology on future Gold Wings?

In its simplest form, the idea of the new system is to incorporate weather information from the internet into the bike’s navigation system, allowing it to reroute you to avoid bad conditions, or even to direct you to a dry refuge if there’s no way to ride around a rainstorm. In that form, it’s an idea that could easily be implemented in almost any app-based navigation system. However, Honda’s plans go much further than that.

The second stage of the idea is tying in the bike’s functions with this weather information. One of several patents filed about the idea suggests that the position of a bike’s electric windscreen and the settings of its heated grips could be automatically altered to account for weather conditions. However, as bikes and cars become increasingly “aware” of their surroundings thanks to on-board technology like radar, cameras, and even lidar systems, there’s the potential to move away from simply using web-based weather information. Honda’s patent also goes into detail about using information from sensors on other road users’ vehicles to get a clearer and more up-to-date picture of what’s happening on the road ahead.

Further Honda patents around similar systems have also been published that show how information from other cars and bikes could be used to alert riders about temporary obstructions or dangers like potholes, again with a specific eye to motorcycles rather than cars. One, for instance, compares data coming from cars and motorcycles to pick out small obstacles that motorcyclists are avoiding but car drivers are passing over; that information can then be used to alert other riders to the danger before they reach it.

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