Honda is looking to nature to improve the safety of driving, using bio-mimicry of the behavior of a school of fish to inform a new technical concept it’s unveiling at CES called Safe Swarm. Safe Swarm uses vehicle-to-vehicle communication based on the dedicated short range communication standard to provide assistance to a human driver.

Safe Swarm essentially means that cues picked up by one vehicle equipped with connective communication tech can pass along information to others in proximity, far before a driver would be aware of anything. Cars can shuttle their collected knowledge down the line, propagating info about a pile-up potentially miles ahead in near real-time to help make it easier for human drivers to take action to avoid problems before they happen.

Other car companies are working on similar tech; Mobileye’s REM system works on a very similar basis, connecting vehicles equipped with Mobileye sensor tech so that they can share real-time traffic and road condition info to inform ADAS and other autonomous driving features. It’s a bit like a fully automated Waze that doesn’t require driver input.

This is another example of tech not imminently bound for production, but which conceptually shows the growing connectivity between cars. Autonomous cars would benefit greatly from something like Safe Swarm, of course, but it also has the potential to save a lot of lives before we reach true self-driving at the consumer level.