Nissan Has a High-Tech Solution for Those Who Hate Queuing (Which Is Everybody)

The fact you need to stand while all this is happening just adds insult to injury. People have tried to deal with these aspects over the time, but the best they've come up with so far was the issuing of numbered tickets. You take yours and then go sit in a chair and wait for the magical number to appear on a screen. At which point you jump up in joy and break a blood vessel in one of your legs.

The system was decent, but now Nissan has something better. Built on its ProPILOT autonomous driving technology, the ProPILOT Chair is essentially a collection of chairs that help people form a queue in an orderly fashion and with absolutely zero hassle.

The link with the self-driving technology is quite obvious. The ProPILOT chair will automatically follow the chair next to it (in a preset direction) while maintaining a fixed distance between them, similar to what a driverless car would do on a highway. When the chair reaches the end of the line and its occupant has left it, it extracts itself from the line and takes its place at the other end, closing the loop.

At this point, you're probably smiling or thinking "is Nissan messing with us?" Well, no, the Japanese manufacturer is actually pretty serious about its ProPILOT chair. So serious that test runs at a few selected restaurants across Japan will commence right now and end on December 27.

If you strain your memory a little you'll remember that this isn't the first time Nissan tries to overcomplicate the simple furniture element that is the chair. In February, it showcased an office chair that could park itself at the sound of a hand clap. We never felt like pushing the chair you sat on back under the table was such a complicated task that it required robotic help. But then again we don't have an autonomous driving technology called ProPILOT we need to promote, do we?