A roadway safety pilot project led by Honda and the Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) produced positive results, and the automaker is hopeful that other states and manufacturers will join the initiative to create safer roads.

The Honda Proactive Roadway Maintenance System used real-time vehicle-generated data to detect and report road deficiencies. ODOT team members drove Honda test vehicles across approximately 3,000 miles of roads in central and southeastern Ohio under a wide range of real-world conditions including rural and urban environments, various weather conditions and different times of the day. The test vehicles were equipped with advanced vision and LiDAR sensors that monitored the road conditions like road signs, guardrails and potholes.

Honda said that the results were highly accurate with a 99% accuracy detecting damaged or obstructed signs, 93% accuracy for damaged guardrails and 89% average accuracy for potholes.

“When deficiencies were detected, AI-processed data flowed automatically to ODOT dashboards, where work orders were generated and prioritized by the severity of the issue — without a crew needing to drive around to look for problems,” said Honda chief engineer Sue Bai.

“Our project team estimates that scaled deployment could save ODOT more than $4.5 million a year!”

More importantly, the system could produce better safety outcomes for drivers as well as the people performing road work, Bai said. With the system detecting the damage, the risk of manual inspections diminishes.

According to the director of Safety Strategy for Honda Brian Bautsch, the automaker is in active conversations with other states about expanding the system to their transportation departments.

“We can imagine other manufacturers with similar safety and driver assistance technologies in their vehicles joining this effort in the future,” said Bai.

Honda isn't the only company with a pilot program detecting road hazards. Autonomous vehicle company Waymo partnered with navigation provider Waze to detect and provide up-to-date information on potholes where Waymo operates.

The data will be visible to Waze users, as well as cities and state transportation departments alongside user-reported pothole information. And Waze application users will be able to verify the Waymo-reported potholes, which the companies say will increase the data's accuracy.

The pilot program will launch in the San Francisco Bay, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Austin and Atlanta metro areas with the intention to expand to more cities.