Honda working on a motorcycle helmet with built-in radar

If the patent-prowlers are to believed, Honda is working on a motorcycle helmet which incorporates safety radar.

RideApart is telling us they’ve uncovered a Honda patent for a motorcycle helmet that features a rear-facing radar scanner, which feeds data into a CPU, which is also presumably mounted on the helmet. The onboard gadgetry would work together to warn of an impending collision from the rear, allowing the rider to move themselves out of danger’s way.

What’s the point of this sort of system? Besides the obvious benefit of rear-facing radar in avoiding rear-end collisions (still a major source of fatalities), the benefit of mounting it on a helmet means it can work across multiple bikes, and can even be worn on older machines which might otherwise be unable to integrate that sort of technology.

Whether we’ll see this actually hit the market is another question, as patents prove nothing about actual real-world availability, but the idea of a helmet-based safety system makes sense, and as vehicles become increasingly more automated, we’d expect to see more of this sort of thing.

The downside of the system mounted to your helmet? Weight, and battery life. Touring riders who spend whole days in the saddle will want a system that’s got more than a couple of hours of battery life. But, stay tuned, as this tech is obviously still under development.