Honda is slated to show a new innovation in car technology at next month's Consumer Electronics Show, featuring an electric vehicle concept that, for the first time in the automobile industry's 100-year history, will feature emotions.
Honda's Cooperative Mobility Ecosystem
The concept car in question is what Honda calls the "NeuV". The "concept automated EV commuter vehicle" comes equipped with artificial intelligence called the "emotion engine", vaguely billed as being able to create new possibilities in terms of human-to-car interaction.
The NeuV fits snugly in Honda's theme for this year's CES, called the Cooperative Mobility Ecosystem. It's supposed to paste artificial intelligence, robotics and big data together to transform the quintessential mobility experience.
"From reducing traffic congestion to creating new modes of in-car connectivity, visitors will have an opportunity to explore and demo technologies with the potential to make people's lives better," Honda's official statement reads.
The "NeuV," A Car With Feelings
The concept render depicts the compact and presumably lightweight NeuV vehicle. It looks almost like a cube, with a flat, monolithic tailgate and a hoodless design. The sleek and shiny fenders run across the NeuV's roof. Its design, predominantly flanked with transparent panels, looks very futuristic.
But the emotion engine is the real stunner here, and it works by allowing the car to react to its driver's conversations, and honda's end goal is to create deeper connections between the human and the car.
How exactly the engine works is still up for a tad bit more elaboration, but it's fair to say that a car which issues own emotion-based responses is quite ambitious, considering that something as simple as virtual assistants find it quite difficult to do the same, trying to harbor a personality of their own.
To its merit, the NeuV does still reside in concept car territory, and it'll take a few more milestones before Honda can actually get to the manufacturing side of things. But Honda's theme for CES does forecast the automobile technology's beeline toward commuter mobility, and harnessing the power of AI is a clever step forward in the right direction, concept or not.
The 2017 Consumer Electronics Show kicks off Jan. 5. It's a major annual event filled to the gills with product unveilings and new technologies in the consumer electronics industry.
Do you think that NeuV can become successful beyond being a concept car? What do you suppose is the purpose of outfitting emotions on a vehicle? Feel free to sound off in the comments section below!
