Honda Nav Screens to Warn of High-Crime Areas

Navigation systems grow more complex every day.  Already, nav screens that provide live traffic updates, give weather reports, identify known speed traps and accept e-mailed directions from MapQuest (or Google Maps, if you own a BMW) are available to car shoppers.  Now, Honda is taking the next logical step, at least in Japan.

Physorg reports, "Japanese automaker Honda Motor Co. will start a new system this week warning motorists when they are driving close to crime hotspots."  Honda is offering the service only in Japan, "even though auto theft is less common" there "than in many other developed countries."

AFP explains, "Based on information from the police, drivers will get an alert through Honda's on-board navigation system about areas where cars have been damaged, stolen or broken into in the past." 

Technoride reports, "In the U.S., automakers have privately said it's not a big problem acquiring and overlaying crime data onto navigation systems, and it would be the kind of information that would benefit from being updated in real time, rather than relying on disc-based data that might be several years out of date. But the automakers (and makers of portable GPS devices) are scared to death of implementing this. No one minds going second or third once there's consensus, but being the pioneer is quite another matter."  A Honda spokesman in the U.S. told Technoride the company has "no pending plan to add this feature to our system."

Still, there might be a market for it.  Paranoia sells in the U.S. The current-generation Volvo S80 is available with an optional "heartbeat monitor" that claims to warn owners from a distance, via an alert to their key fob, if someone is waiting for them in their car.

Autoblog doubts it would work here.  "There'd be wide swaths of the country that this navi would recommend you avoid. Places like Washington DC, where crime is apparently legal and perpetrated by criminals with offices and staffs."

Here, we're more likely to see useful high-tech nav gear like dual-view screens that entertain passengers while giving directions to the driver, and the inevitable mobile starbucks ads in our cars.

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