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Nissan Has Fitted 1.4 Million Cameras on Qashqai Crossovers Since 2014

To European car buyers, Nissan is known as "that company that makes the Qashqai." However, just like sausages are VW's most popular product, Nissan's best seller is the video camera. What?
Nissan Qashqai AVM 6 photos
Photo: Nissan
Nissan Has Fitted 1.4 Million Cameras on Qashqai Since 2014Nissan Has Fitted 1.4 Million Cameras on Qashqai Since 2014Nissan Has Fitted 1.4 Million Cameras on Qashqai Since 2014Nissan Has Fitted 1.4 Million Cameras on Qashqai Since 2014Nissan Has Fitted 1.4 Million Cameras on Qashqai Since 2014
Since the second-generation Qashqai crossover was launched in 2014, the company has fitted more than 1.4 million cameras to this type of vehicle. That's huge, comparable to a particular car model, even the Toyota Corolla… or the Ford Model T.

"Unlike rival systems that rely on radar systems to monitor movement around the car, all three elements of Nissan’s Safety Shield work using data from the rear-view AVM camera providing drivers with exceptional visibility and protection. The safety of our passengers is the number one priority and Nissan’s proactive approach to safety technology is there to assist drivers at all times," said Safety Shield senior engineer Christopher Parke.

If you also include the Juke and X-Trail (Rogue), the number rises to 1.9 million cameras so far. But why are there so many? Well, the Nissan Around View Monitor system, or AVM for short, features four wide-angle cameras attached to the front, back and two sides of the car.

The Qashqai and its big sister also have a camera mounted in the windscreen, which is used for traffic sign recognition and automatically dipping the main beam headlamps.

We had a few chances to test the system and found it to be particularly useful when parking. The AVM provides a 360-degree overview of the car from a bird's-eye view, as pictured from above. Of course, the system isn't unique to Nissan, but it works well despite costing significantly less than on some German carmakers.

With crossover sales expected to double by the end of the decade, Nissan believes it can sell 10 million car cameras by 2020. Pretty soon, we'll be comparing our cars in terms of processing speed and how many megapixels they've got, not just horsepower and torque.

Nissan engineers have already started work on the next generation of cameras. One preview could be what they fitted to the Gripz concept, which had cameras in the headlights to film and stream footage to the Internet.

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About the author: Mihnea Radu
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Mihnea's favorite cars have already been built, the so-called modern classics from the '80s and '90s. He also loves local car culture from all over the world, so don't be surprised to see him getting excited about weird Japanese imports, low-rider VWs out of Germany, replicas from Russia or LS swaps down in Florida.
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