Honda Wants To Teach You To Ride A Bike

Tweet

Japanese super corporation Honda has begun accepting pre-orders of their ‘Bicycle Safety Simulator’. As you can see above, despite looking like an arcade game, the point of this thing is to teach bicycle safety to children and the elderly. It’s scheduled to begin shipping next year.

Although it might look like a lame arcade video game, the point of this simulator is to teach bicycle road safety. According to automotive blog Jalopnik, Japan has an increasing bicycle accident problem, and this is Honda’s attempt to reign in the problem.

The simulator will teach things like safety awareness and risk prediction. Honda hopes to stock these things in places like schools, law enforcement offices, and driving schools.

The machine will feature courses like ‘going to school’ and ‘going to the store’ and other ‘age realistic scenarios’. After you are hit by a bus finish a successful ride to the store, the machine will display your path, and show your virtual bike from multiple angles, presumably so you can see and correct any mistakes you made. The simulator even features a ‘walking sensor’ that can tell when the user gets off and walks his bike.

With a big price tag of $7,852, don’t expect many people to be taking them home. Honda only plans to sell 500 of these things a year. I plan on waiting until somebody hacks one of these things and installs a Tour de France mode.