Your Safety - Our Passion - By Design

Honda designs all of its vehicles with safety in mind, not only the safety of Honda vehicle occupants, but safety for the occupants of other vehicles and all road users, including pedestrians.


“Passive” and “Active” Safety Systems

There are two main types of safety systems: active and passive. “Active safety” technologies, like those in the Honda Sensing™ suite of safety and driver assistive technologies, are working while you’re driving. This includes the automatic emergency braking (a component of CMBS) and other technologies that help mitigate the potential for a collision or its severity. Other technologies, such as rearview cameras, can augment your view of the road.

Then, there are “passive safety” systems. These are the systems that you hope you never need. But they’re critical to your safety in the event of a collision. One of most innovative Honda passive safety systems is the ACE™ Body Structure.


ACE™ stands for Advanced Compatibility Engineering™, and it’s a Honda-exclusive body design that uses a network of front frame structures to absorb and deflect the energy from a frontal collision. This helps reduce the force transferred to the cabin and more evenly disperse the forces transferred to other vehicles involved. That means it’s not just Honda drivers that are safer in the event of a collision—it’s everybody.

To help us create a safer driving experience for our customers—and to continue the refining ACE™ Body Structure—Honda operates two of the world’s most sophisticated crash safety research and testing facilities, in Ohio and Japan. This includes the world’s first multi-directional crash test facility at our automobile R&D center in Japan. Not all collisions in the real world are head on, so Honda didn’t want to test only head-on collisions, but many types of crash scenarios including: car-to-car impacts, car-to-barrier collisions, front, side and rear impacts and offset and oblique-angle collisions.

Virtually Protecting our Customers

Honda has recently helped develop an advanced safety visualization technology called Real Impact. This technology creates highly detailed three-dimensional models of a vehicle’s crash safety structure and allows Honda engineers and designers to better visualize how these systems work in a variety of collision scenarios.

Engineers are able to manipulate the 3D rendering, rotate the view in any direction and strip away parts of the vehicle to isolate a section or component for more thorough analysis. The crash barrier can also be rendered transparent in the virtual environment so the immediate effects of a crash can be viewed from multiple points of view, including from the driver's seat.

We do this work because it’s part of our company DNA – clean, safe fun. We work every day to create safer driving experiences for everybody on the road. Honda asks everyone on the road to help make it even safer by buckling up, putting away phones, and texting only when you’ve arrived safely at your destination.