The concept of driverless cars is fast growing and Nissan is one of the top contender who is showing keen interest in making it a possibility. Earlier, they launched a teaser video showing how the electric car Leaf will be able to charge while on the road and park itself in a person’s home or office to share energy.
The company is further expanding their idea and is gearing up to showcase the new Piloted Drive autonomous technology with the Qashqai model in 2017. The model is being built in association with engineers from UK. And, the brand prefers to address it as semi-autonomous because automated technology has so many legal issues to go through.
For now, most automobile manufacturers will prefer to call their technology semi-automatic and will suggest a human driver to be always there in the seat to make decisions in case of an emergency. Nissan does the same. According to their statement, the Piloted Drive autonomous tech is version 1.0 and there will be a lot of iterations before the concept is fully perfected.
The idea is to remove the hassle from people especially when they are driving through heavy traffic or on the highway. Both these activities require a lot of attention. With the help of sensors mounted on all sides and an automated system, the car can easily zoom past traffic and will maintain a safe distance to avoid crashing. It can do multiple actions including acceleration, braking besides steering in the right direction while calculating the space available.
Nissan’s chief confirmed that the Qashqai set to debut in 2017 will not only be extremely futuristic but will also be affordable so that the auto tech reaches mainstream audience. “We have no plans to make 100,000 of the models. Soon, the same technology will be equipped with all Nissan’s other models including the Micra and the Juke. It doesn’t mean we can just hike the pricing of a Micra which is why we are going with a price tag affordable for most with the Qashqai,” said Richard Chandler.
Chandler is in charge of head of advanced product strategy at Nissan. He added that there will be some restrictions on the piloted drive tech for now. It won’t allow driverless lane shifting but will support multiple lane control. More features can be expected to be rolled out in future versions in a span of four years.
