Nissan starts testing semi-autonomous rides
yokohama — In the future Nissan envisions, driverless cars will pick up children from school and recommend restaurants to tourists in various languages.
Nissan Motor says feedback from people who try it will be used to fine-tune its “robo-vehicle mobility service”. The automaker said on Friday that 300 people have already signed up to try out Easy Ride next month. The Japanese automaker hopes to roll it out as a commercial service in the early 2020s. Details, including pricing, are undecided.
The service was developed in a partnership, which began last year, with Japanese mobile game provider DeNA, which has been working on driverless bus and delivery services in Japan. For now, Easy Ride will be limited to a 4.5km (2.8-mile) course that starts from Nissan headquarters and winds through a shopping mall area in this port city. The app is only in Japanese, but there are plans to offer it in several languages for tourists and other travellers.
Like other autonomous drive technology, the Easy Ride vehicle is packed with cameras, sensors and radars to recognise pedestrians, intersections, traffic lights and other vehicles.
It’s still only driverless in principle, though, since Japanese law doesn’t allow totally driverless vehicles. So a human driver in a nohands position sits behind the steering wheel. The system isn’t flawless, with human intervention sometimes needed to avoid a crash, according to Nissan. It’s just one of several such kinds of technology being worked on around the world, such as Google’s Waymo and Tesla’s Autopilot. Just about all the major automakers, including Mercedes and Toyota, are working on such technologies. Nissan has been among the most aggressive.
Although opinion is divided on the projection that as many as 10 million driverless cars will be on roads by 2020, everyone agrees the technology is going to grow.
“I think the potential is quite large in the long term, especially in large cities such as Tokyo or Boston, where there is a need for pointto-point transit but little incentive to own cars,” said Nicholas Evans, an assistant professor at UMass Lowell. —