While Mercedes has been reported as promising a traffic-jam autopilot in the 2013 S class due later this year, I was surprised to learn that Honda briefly made claims that their 2006 "Accord ADAS" in the UK was a self-driving car.

This CBS video from January 2006 described the car as a self-driving car, and has a honda rep touting how game-changing it is.

However this car is, as the name suggests, an ADAS car with Honda's lane-keeping system which will nudge the car back into the lane if you drift out of it. Such lane keeping systems have indeed been around for a while. This car notices if you keep your hands off the wheel for more than a short time, and sounds an alarm. In order to "self-drive" the demonstrator keeps his hands close to the wheel and touches it every so often to avoid the alarm. You get the impression that he and others have been using the car in this fashion.

It is no idle alarm. The LKAS nudge is not quite powerful enough to steer the car in any kind of real turn, and the camera finding lane markers of course occasionally fails to find them. This, again is common in fancy ADAS cars. What is interesting is that Honda allowed this to be pitched as an attempt at self-driving. They have not done this recently, though lane-keep ADAS systems have continued to be available since then from Honda and other vendors.

Honda has been generally not too active in announcements of self-driving cars. They have shown concept cars that listed self-driving as one of the features, but these were concept cars, not actual implementations. Toyota and Nissan have both made various announcements. The smaller Japanese companies (Mazda, Mitsubishi and Subaru/Fuji) also have no public projects.

On a second note, I will be speaking Wednesday morning at the MLOVE Conference in Monterey on self-driving cars. Then I will be heading over to the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop -- a 35 year old conference I've been going to for decades which happens to be in the same place at the same time.