Honda e advance: hard to fault

Driving my Honda e is a joy beyond my expectations.

It’s so easy to drive. Smart entry, allows it to power up and off you go.

I normally drive in One Pedal mode, which means I seldom use the brake pedal. Stop at the lights, and it applies AutoBrake itself. You can leave it in Drive, so you are ready to accelerate away. And accelerate it does.

It makes no effort, no ‘engine’ noise, or gears to change, the motor just drives the car forward. Ease off the Accelerator Pedal and it slows, or comes to a complete stop, when required.

I was never keen on Automatic gearboxes, thought they were inefficient and never quite felt I was in control, but One Pedal mode in the Honda e is quite different. Always in control, fun and responsive to drive, and efficient.

Road Departure Mitigation

The advance model comes with lots of tech. It has cameras, sensors and radar, and many of these built-in features provide assistance, especially when parking, and manoeuvring near fixed objects or other cars. The audio and visual warnings, and views from the front, rear and side cameras are very helpful at low speed. The car also manages to create a “birdseye” view.

However there is one Safety Feature where the jury is out. Road Mitigation Departure or RDM for short, is noticeable as soon as you take to the highway. It flashed up warnings more than once on my first Test Drive, and again several times on my First Drive home, when I collected my car.

Not only does RDM flash up warnings on the dash in either White, Amber or Red, it can also generate an Audible warning, and it takes control of the steering wheel. Save to say, when you are first driving the Honda e advance, and getting use to driving an electric car, these warnings can range from a “distraction” to “unnerving” at a time when you want to feel in complete control of your new vehicle.

Also when you have passengers in your car, they are likely to be anxious as to why your car is beeping at you, as you go around a bend?

Now the advance model has lots of other Intelligent features like Adaptive Cruise Control that can be set to follow the car in front. You can adjust the ‘Follow Distance’ and once set your car with adjust your speed to follow that vehicle and maintain that safe distance. There are other clever features that prevent you from driving into fixed objects or stationary cars at low speeds Low Speed Braking Control . You can opt to use Lane Keeping Assist, or Collision Mitigation Braking System, which are options you can control.

Learning to Live with RDM

As with any new car, there is lots to learn. And as the Honda e advance is packed with technology, touch screens, Apps and menu options, not to mention a very comprehensive User Manual to guide you. So we find there are 3 Settings: Early / Normal / Delayed* The default is Delayed, but there is no Off.

Fortunately there is a way to turn RDM off, and it’s relatively easy to do. But, and this is the big but, every time you Power Off and Power On again, RDM resets and switches itself on again. So if you prefer to drive without this “safety feature’ active, you must remember to switch it off, every time.

So the purpose of this Blog is to make a case, and hopefully a strong case, that Honda will listen to, so that they will introduce a software update that will either add an OFF option to the 3 settings, and/or introduce an update that ensures that if you switch RDM off via the Safety Config screen, it stays off, permanently until you decide to reinstate this feature.

A relatively simple request, for a relatively simple software update.

The City Car escapes on British B-roads

Of course the Honda e advance was conceived and designed as a City Car. But some of us could see that this compact 5 door Battery powered Electric Vehicle could also be fun to drive in rural areas on our B-Roads.

And this is possibly why we have encountered these issues with RDM. British roads are often windy, with lots of bends. The carriageway can be narrow at times, and more minor roads are not always marked with white lines. There are no hard surfaces like kerbs to detect. And these roads are often undulating. So minor Blind Spots are common.

Your cars radar, sensors and cameras are looking for lines and surfaces to detect the path of the road ahead. While you will be able to read the road ahead by using hedgerows, tree lines and overhead power lines, your car was never expected to read this type of rural environment. This is not an urban space with lots of Man-Made infrastructure.

And so it flashes up warnings. As you approach a left bend that it can’t see around. Or maybe a vehicle is approaching on the opposite lane, as you are about the take the bend, and it assumes you are on a collision course. And then of course you reach a slight hump in the road, which you may be able to see over, but your car “sees” a Blind Spot ahead.

Now sometimes the issues are more subtle. You are approaching a series of bends, you can see the road is clear, and you opt to take a racing line through the bends, which means you will stray close the central white lines, or might be close to crossing them. Now this manoeuvre could be considered risky, and perhaps some might argue that RDM is reminding you that you should be following all of the twists and turns of the road. But of course having made your decision, the last thing you need at this point is for your car to take control of the steering wheel, and flash up warnings and beep an audible one. This is not the time you want, or need these distractions.

So please HONDA let us have the Option

So yes, it would be nice to at least have the Option: to Turn RDM Off. And know that it will remain Off, until we decide that it might be useful on our next journey, which might be along a Dual Carriageway, Motorway or through a busy City urban landscape, where no doubt our City Cars will feel at home.