Photo: Nissan
The future is all about boring autonomous vehicles and you can’t do anything to stop that. Even the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) believes in it and teamed up with Nissan to create a car that drives itself.
Japanese automaker Nissan Motor Co. announced it signed a five-year research and development partnership with NASA to advance autonomous vehicle systems and prepare the tech for commercial application.
"The work of NASA and Nissan – with one directed to space and the other directed to earth, is connected by similar challenges," said Carlos Ghosn, president and CEO of Nissan Motor Co. "The partnership will accelerate Nissan's development of safe, secure and reliable autonomous drive technology that we will progressively introduce to consumers beginning in 2016 up to 2020."
The two companies will test a fleet of zero-emission self-driving cars at Ames to prove the new technology’s worthiness. NASA uses almost the same tech to operate planetary rovers from a mission control center.
Nissan expects to bring autonomous cars to market in 2020 and the models won’t just cope with highway driving but also with city traffic, being able to handle nearly all situations.
Sounds to be a bold statement, considering that Google’s autonomous car gets scared of a plastic bag in the middle of the road and immediately applies the brakes. But then, technology advances pretty damn quick these days and in a few years computing power will be able to assess unpredictable traffic situations.
"The work of NASA and Nissan – with one directed to space and the other directed to earth, is connected by similar challenges," said Carlos Ghosn, president and CEO of Nissan Motor Co. "The partnership will accelerate Nissan's development of safe, secure and reliable autonomous drive technology that we will progressively introduce to consumers beginning in 2016 up to 2020."
The two companies will test a fleet of zero-emission self-driving cars at Ames to prove the new technology’s worthiness. NASA uses almost the same tech to operate planetary rovers from a mission control center.
Nissan expects to bring autonomous cars to market in 2020 and the models won’t just cope with highway driving but also with city traffic, being able to handle nearly all situations.
Sounds to be a bold statement, considering that Google’s autonomous car gets scared of a plastic bag in the middle of the road and immediately applies the brakes. But then, technology advances pretty damn quick these days and in a few years computing power will be able to assess unpredictable traffic situations.
Google News