The Japanese automaker claims that its new technology can detect the potential for a traffic jam and determine whether the driving pattern of a vehicle is likely to create one.

Working with researchers from the University of Tokyo, Honda conducted experimental testing of a system utilizing the technology on a primary vehicle and with several secondary vehicles trailing behind it.

The test results demonstrated that the system helped increase the average speed of the primary vehicle by approximately 23 percent and improved fuel efficiency of the secondary trailing vehicles by approximately 8 percent.

Rather than providing information to help the driver avoid existing congestion based on current traffic information, the system monitors the acceleration and deceleration patterns of the vehicle to determine whether the driver’s driving pattern is likely to create traffic congestion. Based on this determination, the system provides the driver with appropriate information, including a color-coded display through the on-board terminal, to encourage smooth driving which will help alleviate the intensity of acceleration and deceleration by trailing vehicles, thereby helping to prevent or minimize the occurrence of vehicle congestion.

Moreover, the system is said to be even more affective when all the vehicles communicate with each other, which is similar to the SARTRE ‘road train’ initiative being tested in Europe though Honda’s system still requires the driver to make adjustments to their driving pattern rather than rely on an autonomous systemlike with SARTRE.

“We hope that other automakers will use our IMA technologies,” one Honda executive told the business daily, referring to Honda’s hybrid system.

“We want to set industry standards for hybrid technologies in the world’s biggest car market,” he was quoted as saying.

Historically, Japanese carmakers have been cautious about providing their cutting-edge hybrid technologies to other companies, due to fears of losing their competitive edge.

Honda’s bigger rival Toyota Motor said last year it will manufacture the third model of its Prius hybrid car and its key parts in China in a bid to boost sales there.

Superior Court Judge Dudley W. Gray II was hearing witnesses from both sides as Honda sought to reverse a court commissioner’s award of $9,867 to Heather Peters, who opted out of a class-action settlement designed to give some 200,000 owners between $100 and $200 each, plus a rebate if they buy a new Honda.

Her success in small claims court has caused some 1,700 other hybrid owners to follow her example.

Honda called as a key witness, Karen Takahashi, service manager at Honda Hollywood, where Peters bought her car.

Takahashi testified she took a Honda hybrid out for a 115-mile test drive on freeways and streets and was able to achieve 53 mpg to 55 mpg. She said she is a conservative driver and did not try to manipulate the car to achieve better mileage.

On cross-examination, Peters, who is a lawyer, showed photos of the dashboard on the car that was tested and pointed out that its battery was fully charged. Peters has said her battery failed early on, received a software update and never again was fully charged, leaving the car to run almost entirely on gasoline.

Peters called a former Honda analyst and technical writer, Jeffrey Holliday of Baltimore, who said he was tasked with testing Honda hybrids after repeated customer complaints about mileage. He testified he was never able to duplicate the promised 50 mpg listed in the brochure for the car.

“I’m an aggressive driver so I made an attempt to drive conservatively. It’s a great car but I was not able to duplicate it,” he said.

Peters’ husband, Michael Cassadin testified the car had performed well when he first met Peters in 2008, but it quickly deteriorated and a software update made it worse. He said that when they left the house Thursday the dashboard showed the car was getting 25 mpg.

Peters’ small-claims suit was a unique end run around the class-action process that she said offered too little to Honda owners and too much to lawyers. She urged Honda owners to take the small claims route as she did.

Honda’s appeal of the small claims verdict is essentially a retrial. According to small-claims rules, it is the last chance for review of the case and cannot be appealed further.

Unlike the small-claims trial, Honda has legal representation and Peters, who renewed her law license, is presenting new evidence she has discovered since she received her award. She testified in the first part of the hearing last Friday with lawyers for Honda questioning her.

A judge has valued the class-action settlement at $170 million. Attorneys for the plaintiffs have pegged the value between $87.5 million and $461.3 million, depending largely on how many people accept rebates of up to $1,500.

The judge approved more than $8 million in plaintiff attorneys’ fees in his 43-page ruling.

Using the technology, the plant can extract 80 percent of rare earths from batteries in 12,000 hybrid vehicles annually.

Honda hopes the technology will provide it with a stable supply of rare earths, which fluctuate wildly in price.

Honda’s cumulative global hybrid vehicle sales has topped 800,000 units, and it expects to see a large number of such vehicles ending up in scrap yards in the future.

Leading Japanese automaker Toyota Motor Corp. has been recycling nickel from used batteries since 2010.

Undeterred, Honda stayed the course, nurturing the maligned Crosstour along, eventually dropping “Accord” from its name and adding a four-cylinder engine to the lineup.

Leading With Its Chin

Given Honda’s track record of displaying thinly veiled, production-ready designs and calling them concepts, we’d wager that what you’re seeing here is more or less the 2013 Honda Crosstour.

Count on the revised fascia making the cut, the grille now sporting a chunkier chrome surround, with sharper creases below the headlamps. A large, blacked-out lower fascia houses the fog lamps and stretches across the front, met in the middle by a sill plate of contrasting color in an attempt to lend the Crosstour a more SUV-like appearance. The lower blackout treatment extends to the side sills and around the back, where it meets a revised, more horizontal tailgate intended to continue the rugged tone.

The production model is slated to roll on 18-inch wheels in place of the five-spoke, 19-inch wheels shown on the concept. Of course, if the 19s do become available, it wouldn’t be the first time something from a concept made it to the options sheet.

Heavy Doses of Nanny Tech

Honda says the new Crosstour will feature heavily revised trim materials, keyless ignition, and an eight-inch screen housing an infotainment system; V-6 models will receive steering-wheel-mounted paddle shifters.

The Crosstour’s mechanicals were not available for public viewing in New York, but Honda assures us that buyers will have their choice of either a re-engineered and more powerful 3.5-liter V-6, or a 192-hp, 2.4-liter four-cylinder engine (output figures for the V-6 weren’t provided). V-6 models will get a six-speed automatic and the option of Honda’s Real Time 4WD system. Four-cylinder models will have to make do with a five-speed auto and front-wheel drive.

A potentially confusing number of safety-warning devices will be available, including warning systems for both lane departure and forward collision; both use a camera mounted behind the windshield to monitor the road ahead, ultimately warning the driver of lane departures and potential collisions. Honda-exclusive LaneWatch utilizes yet another camera — this one mounted in the passenger’s side mirror — to give an enhanced view of the passenger-side roadway. Add to these visibility aids re-shaped headrests, an expanded-view driver’s mirror, and a back-up camera; it seems the Crosstour is trying to take responsibility for those who can’t be bothered to look after themselves. Or at least those who don’t like turning their head to check their surroundings.

Given Honda’s near-pathological reluctance to offer an Accord wagon here in the States, it seems at times as if Honda is trying to force faithful buyers who find the CR-V too cutesy and the Pilot too ute-sy behind the wheel of their misunderstood middle child. To that we say: “Don’t call us; we’ll call you.”

The Japanese auto maker reported it sold 126,999 vehicles in March, down from 133,650 a year earlier and 15% above February’s total.

Car sales were down 17% while truck sales jumped 14%, Honda division sales–which include the Fit, Accord, Odyssey and Pilot–decreased 4.3%. The much-smaller Acura luxury division saw sales fall 11%. The company said Honda’s year-over-year sales decline comes after an exceptionally strong sales month in the year-ago period.

Accord sales fell 15% as Civic sales slipped 9.7%. CR-V sales jumped 40%, posting an all-time monthly sales record.

March had 28 sales days, while the year-ago month had 27 sales days.

Battered by the strong yen and floods in Thailand, Honda in February reported a 41% drop in earnings for the fiscal third quarter and forecast a sharp fall in profit for the full fiscal year.

Honda took the hardest hit among Japanese car makers from floods in Thailand and last month unveiled big Indonesia expansion plans, underscoring attempts to widen its production and export base in Southeast Asia. Honda is also in the midst of a massive North American expansion that will end with the region producing more than half of its global vehicles.

Earlier Tuesday, Chrysler Group LLC reported its new-vehicle sales jumped 34% in March to the highest monthly total in four years. General Motors Co. (GM) and Ford Motor Co. (F) posted gains of 12% and 5%, respectively, driven mainly by consumer purchases. Toyota Motor Corp. (TM) leapt 15% and the car maker set a record for Prius hybrid sales as it added new variants to showrooms. Meanwhile, Nissan Motor Co. (NSANY, 7201.TO) said its sales rose 12.5% last month, setting a U.S. record.

American depositary shares were down 1.2% at $38.38 in recent trading, outpacing the broader market. The stock is up 26% so far this year.

It’s about time. In the last half-dozen years, Honda has ceded the fleet-wide fuel economy crown in North America to Hyundai, the fast-rising South Korean car company.

In the last decade, Honda abandoned its hybrid advantage to Toyota, too. Remember, the Honda Insight was the first North American hybrid, not the Toyota Prius. But it’s Toyota you and I think about when hybrids enter the discussion.

Engine performance? Hyundai and its corporate sibling, Kia, have been aggressively pushing direct injection engines. Ford has branded its EcoBoost direct injection/turbocharged engines, too. Honda? The fuel economy gains in the latest Civic have been all about aerodynamics and tire technology, not powertrain innovation.

Design? Well, Honda has never been overwhelmed with plaudits for its designs, but lately we’ve seen some truly awful work here. Take the Acura ZDX. Ugh.

Speaking of Acura, Honda all but abandoned its premium brand starting in 2008 with the onset of the big financial crisis and global near-depression. Now Honda is resetting the Acura story with new models, including the ILX compact car and the IDX compact utility – both of which I have just driven at a product preview here in the desert.

Both the ILX and IDX look like they are going to at least start to put Acura back in the game, chasing upscale buyers who are also sophisticated. What’s more, the ILX will be sold with three powertrain choices: base 2.0-litre four-banger (150 hp), 2.4-litre four (201 hp) and hybrid. The starting price for a pretty well loaded ILX will be less than $30,000, giving this new Acura a price advantage over rivals such as the Mercedes-Benz C250 and Audi A3.

I think the bunker analogy may be the most apt to describe where Honda has been the last few years. But it seems the hunkering down may be at an end.

Indeed, the Detroit News is reporting that Honda has appointed more American locals to executive positions in order to reconnect with its biggest market. Honda has promoted North American COO Tetsuo Iwamura to the position of executive vice-president and, as of April 1, he’ll be working in the U.S., not in Honda’s Tokyo headquarters.

You may ask why Iwamura was in Tokyo managing North America production, planning and sales. Why wasn’t he making decisions for North America from North America? Good question. I suppose the Tokyo bunker felt safer.

“Honda quite literally has become a North American car company headquartered in Tokyo, and that’s a horrible combination,” Jim Hall, principal of 2953 Analytics, an auto consultancy, told the paper.

“When your headquarters isn’t in your most important and biggest-volume market, you become disconnected. [The move] is to reconnect headquarters with their most important market.”

As the Detroit News reports, Honda is going to put more emphasis on developing vehicles for North America, in North America. According to Iwamura, the best way to boost sales in the U.S. is to have U.S. engineers make product decisions for the local market.

Toyota Motor and Nissan Motor resumed production at the end of 2011.

The floods forced hundreds of Japanese companies to shut operations, adversely affecting their earnings expectations.

Earlier this year, Honda revised down its operating income forecast for the year ending on 31 March to 200bn yen ($2.4bn, £1.5bn) from a previous forecast of 270bn yen.

The Honda factory in Ayutthaya has the capacity to produce 240,000 units annually.

Limited production

A Honda Motor spokeswoman said full production would resume at the HATC unit by the second week of April.

Currently production is at about 12% of capacity.

HATC was the only car maker whose factory was completely flooded.

Honda Motor said HATC is one of its most important production centres in the Asia and Oceania regions.

“Honda was totally committed to realising the earliest possible recovery. Honda will maintain the same positioning of HATC in the future and further promote business operations in Thailand,” the company said.

He added that the investment in the archipelago was only the expanded production of its compact eco-car, the Honda Brio, as a general investment to meet the robust demand because the Indonesian economy has been gradually growing.

Meanwhile, the plant in Thailand alone was able to produce 120,000 Brio eco-cars, excluding other models of Honda automobiles.

The industry minister said the auto company invited him and Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra to witness and to officially kick-start its assembly line on March 31 to mark the completion of post-flood rehabilitation.

Previously, the government allowed the company to import zero-tariff cars until June 30 this year to sell to flood-affected people as well as to offset its output losses, aiming to maintain the domestic market share.

Apart from Honda, giant automakers, Suzuki Motor (Thailand) and new investors affirmed their intention to invest and continue using Thailand as their production base, the minister said, adding that some Thailand-based automakers, including Toyota, Nissan, Isuzu and Mitsubishi had announced plans to increase their domestic production capacity.

Referring to recent discussions with the South Korean ambassador to Thailand, Mr Pongsvas said that Korean automobile manufacturers KIA, Daewoo and Ssangyong were currently interested in investing in auto production in Thailand as well.

In a related development, Anchalee Chaleechan, Corporate Communications Division Manager of Asian Honda Motor Co., Ltd, said Indonesia’s total annual car sales stood at 890,000 units as its economy significantly expanded.

She explained that the expansion in the archipelago, which was earlier announced, had been planned before the Thailand’s flood crisis, reiterating that the plan would not affect the company’s investment in Thailand.

The country’s worst flood in decades late 2011 submerged and ravaged industrial estates in the central provinces which house major industrial factories including Honda Automobile (Thailand)’s automobile plant at Rojana Industrial Park in Ayutthaya. As of March 15, 522 of 893 flood-hit industrial plants were fully recovered.

Meanwhile, the Thai Board of Investment (BOI) reported that entrepreneurs had imported machinery and materials worth some Bt80 billion (over $2.67 million) for 303 industrial projects. (MCOT online news)

Pongsvas said Honda executives had insisted that the company would maintain its production in Thailand and has no plan to move out of the country. Honda will resume production, which was hit by severe floods in the second half of last year, on April 1.

Honda was the only carmaker hit by directly by the inundation. About 1,000 of its vehicles were swamped at the factory in Rojana Industrial Park. The company’s auto production, which has total capacity of 240,000 units per year, was disrupted for nearly six months.

The industry minister said Honda’s new factory in Indonesia would serve domestic demand, which is growing very fast, while production in Thailand would continue to serve both the local market and exports. He added that other carmakers besides Honda were still confident to operate in Thailand despite the impact from the floods.

In addition to Honda, Nissan has announced that it will invest in eco-car production in Indonesia. Nissan allocated $400 million to increase its production capacity to 250,000 units by 2014.

According to Indonesia’s automotive industry, domestic sales in February grew by 24.2 per cent from the same month last year to 86,407 units. The growth in the automotive industry is attributed to the rising middle class and low interest rates for loans.