Nissan announces first on-road autonomous vehicle tests in Europe

Nissan will bring real-world demonstrations of autonomous driving cars to the UK in February. Showcasing next-generation technology through electric vehicles, the on-road demonstrations will take place in London, enabling the vehicles and their passengers to cover a diverse city environment.

Passengers, including government officials and technical and safety experts, will be given the opportunity to experience and test the technology in a live environment in a modified Nissan LEAF.

“We are thinking differently about the future of driving–keeping the driver, not the technology, at the centre of everything we do,” a Nissan spokesperson told Cities Today. “With Nissan ProPILOT, drivers choose how much they want to engage autonomous drive features so their driving experience is exactly as they want it to be.”

These will be the first demonstrations of Nissan’s autonomous drive technology on public roads in Europe, representing the next step in Nissan’s Intelligent Mobility blueprint for transforming how cars are driven, powered, and integrated into wider society.

It follows recent announcements that both the refreshed Qashqai and the new LEAF will be equipped with autonomous drive technology to enable single lane autonomous driving on motorways.

“Autonomous drive technologies will provide a whole host of benefits to cities including reduced congestion and improved safety,” added the spokesperson. “It’s a little too early to speculate about what the future of motoring will look like or indeed how it will affect the future of the car. What I can tell you is that we believe that autonomous drive technologies will bring about fundamental changes to our industry and will radically improve the driving experience in terms of safety and comfort for all.”

The announcement was made following a visit to the Nissan Technical Centre Europe (NTCE) in Cranfield, Bedfordshire, by Greg Clark, the UK Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

NTCE, the European research and development hub for Nissan, is developing autonomous drive technologies as well as new advanced fuel, energy and efficiency technologies, in collaboration with the Nissan Technical Centre and Advanced Technical Centre in Japan.

“What’s exciting about autonomous driving is that we know it will usher in a new era in mobility,” said the Nissan spokesperson. “Our focus is on delivering autonomous technologies that improve and support the driving experience rather than removing the driver completely. Today we don’t see significant customer demand for a fully self-driving car with no possibility for the user to take control. Our research tells us that customers want to remain in control but have the option to use technologies that will take away some of the “pain points” of driving–like sitting in a traffic jam on your way to work in the morning.”