The Qashqai crossover will be Nissan’s first vehicle in Europe to feature autonomous “Piloted Drive” technology when it rolls off the line next year, Nissan has announced.
Made in the UK, the refreshed Qashqai will be equipped with “Piloted Drive 1.0”, a feature that allows cars to drive autonomously in a single lane in heavy traffic conditions on highways. Thousands of hours of testing and multiple sensors on the car ensure that the system anticipates its surroundings correctly, Nissan says.
The announcement marks an important step in the brand’s commitment to making autonomous drive tech accessible to all. Nissan has already set out its commitment to launch a range of vehicles with autonomous drive capabilities by 2020, including vehicles that will be able to safely navigate city intersections.
Over the next four years, Nissan will launch cars with increased autonomous capabilities like “multiple-lane control,” which can autonomously negotiate hazards and change lanes during highway driving. And by the end of the decade, the Japanese brand will introduce “inner-city” autonomy, enabling vehicles to negotiate city cross-roads and intersections without driver intervention.
The tech will be installed on mainstream, mass-market cars at affordable prices, with Piloted Drive 1.0 coming to Japan in 2016. An autonomous Nissan Leaf is already on test on Japanese roads, and a planned on-road demo event in Europe this year will showcase the tech to the continent.
“It’s a car people love. It’s a car people trust. It pioneered the crossover boom, and now it will spearhead Nissan’s move towards launching a range of vehicles with autonomous drive capabilities from 2017. Yet again, we are taking technology normally found in premium cars and making it accessible to millions of motorists,” said Paul Willcox, chairman of Nissan Europe.
“The introduction of Piloted Drive technologies will be an evolution, not a revolution as the building blocks for this are already in place in many of our cars today through our Safety Shield Technology. With the driver in control, we want to remove the pain-points of being behind the wheel, like navigating heavy traffic, to put the excitement back into driving,” added Wilcox.
At the 2015 Tokyo Motor Show, Nissan displayed the IDS Concept, which the company says embodies its vision of the future of autonomous driving and zero emission EVs. Nissan is of course a pioneer and leader in electric cars – together with Alliance partner Renault, it has shifted nearly 300,000 EVs since the first Leaf was sold in San Francisco in December 2010.
