How Acura’s ARX-06 Prototype Can Get the Brand Back on Track

Jon Ikeda, senior vice president of HRC, says, “With racing, everything has to happen very quickly. Racing team culture is agile all the time. Decisions have to be made quickly, and then you have to take the proper risks. In business culture, things take a little longer, but there are a lot of things that we can get from racing, like the culture that we’ve tried to apply to ourselves.”

Obviously, having your employees tackle racing on the weekends and engineer production cars during the week can pay dividends in the sometimes years-long development process of a road car.

When I asked about what Acura can take from racing a prototype with seemingly no connection to road cars, David Salters, president of HRC USA, said, “Everybody’s talking about software-defined vehicles. [For the ARX-06 prototype] we use AI and neural networks to develop a traction control system that is, in a sense, self-aware. It’s looking forward for the driver, and it’s learning. We do that. We write all the code.”

And as to how this can be used in a road car, Salters continued, “Honda has a technical forum where the different business divisions bring topics they’re working on to discuss. It’s very nice. Our traction control systems had the most interest, and it came from the road car guys. Our technology goes back into the system, and it gets incorporated.”