Honda has recently (29-March) released a car traffic data system using Google Earth to present traffic status. According to newlaunches.com, the tool allows the company’s “InterNavi Premium Club” members to see traffic data overlayed on GE:
Traffic information is displayed in three colors indicating “smooth (blue),” “busy (orange)” and “congested (red).” Initial service area only extends to 20 km around the center of Tokyo, Nagoya and Osaka, but the coverage will expand nationwide.
The data is collected by Honda’s “InterNavi Floating Car System”, which apparently is installed on customer cars to track their data and share it with a central system. This probably gives very accurate real-time traffic data. But, I’m not sure whether that will be very popular in privacy-concerned countries. Apparently the system has already “collected data of total 100 million kilometers”. Here is the source of the story (in Japanese).
About Frank Taylor
Frank Taylor started the Google Earth Blog in July, 2005 shortly after Google Earth was first released. He has worked with 3D computer graphics and VR for many years and was very impressed with this exciting product. Frank completed a 5.5 year circumnavigation of the earth by sailboat in June 2015 which you can read about at Tahina Expedition, and is a licensed pilot, backpacker, diver, and photographer.
My girlfriends sisters honda has this in Tokyo. The latest version has a split screen, so the driver sees the navagation and the passenger sees a movie or whatever. Japan always seems several steps ahead of us on this stuff.
This sounds good.
This will really avoid traffic jams. But will the data be accurate ?