Snow scoop: Chilling with Honda's VP of corporate planning

You just don't expect snow in San Diego, but that's what we got last week at a launch event for the 2009 Acura TSX. Due to the terms of an embargo, we have to hold off on giving you any information on our driving experiences from the event, but we can tell you that, thanks to a freak snowstorm, we ended up stuck on a mountainside for the better part of three hours, much of it waiting for a snowplow to come and clear us a path to safety. Usually, this would have been a tedious wait, but by a great stroke of good fortune, your correspondent found himself in a car with Dan Bonawitz, vice president of corporate planning and logistics at American Honda. Bonawitz had some interesting things to say about some of the technologies on forthcoming Acura and Honda vehicles (aside from the top-secret 2009 TSX in which we were driving).

First, he mentioned that Acura's Collision Mitigation Braking System (CMBS), currently exclusive to the flagship RL sedan, would likely make its way to other models in the U.S. lineup in the future. While we're not expecting to see the radar-based system in the redesigned TL sedan, due to be unveiled later this year, we wouldn't be surprised to see it on future iterations of the MDXor RDX SUVs. The second tech-related tidbit was that Honda is not intending to bring the Internavi Premium Club to the United States. Internavi is a subscription-based service currently available in Japan that provides weather and user-submitted geotags on points of interest to drivers via an Internet connection. Instead, Bonawitz said that Acura vehicles in the United States would continue to use the AcuraLink architecture to stream data such as traffic and weather to their GPS navigation systems. Asked when Honda would be bringing out a successor to the Honda S2000, Bonawitz said that we can expect to see the current-generation model "for at least another year," which suggests to us that there might be something in the works for 2010. According to Bonawitz, 2010 is also the prospective date for introduction of Acura's delayed "NSX-replacement" V-10-powered supercar, which is expected to be based on Acura's Advanced Sports Car Concept.