Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn talked at CES 2017 and reveled the Nissan future as well as general automotive frame.
Company intentions are to go into direction of zero emissions and zero fatalities, which including testing of vehicles with autonomous driving in Japan, pointing out upcoming Nissan Leaf. Important part of the Nissan future is also installing of Microsoft’s connected car platform in Renault-Nissan Alliance vehicles. Alliance will, together with Mitsubishi, make huge investments in new technologies, without shortcuts or blind spots.
Ghosn talked about Nissan’s plans to significantly increase autonomous development, to the eventual full autonomous. CEO’s predictions are that Nissan vehicles will hit the third stage by 2022 or 2023, but a timeline for full autonomy was not given yet.
Driverless taxi service in Tokyo and human-powered support development
The automaker will test self-driving cars with Japanese tech company DeNA. The goal is driverless taxi service in Tokyo in 2020.
Nisan is developing the Seamless Autonomous Mobility System, in cooperation with NASA. It’s designed to support autonomous driving by human-powered solutions, in the situations where an autonomous vehicle cannot act. Driving near the construction zones or blocked roadways vehicle alerts SAM, people in the System will get the location, find solution and send it back to the car so that driver do not need to take over at all.
Microsoft is building a connected car platform to provide cloud services to vehicles, and could be on the market already in 2018. Using Microsoft’s cloud technology, the software allows automakers to access the vehicle’s data to predict maintenance as well as driver data for research, operate Microsoft’s productivity services, and provide real time and contextual navigation.
Earlier this week is announced that Nissan is halting joint development of luxury cars with Daimler’s Mercedes-Benz, suspending a key project in their seven-year partnership and potentially hitting profitability at a new shared factory in Mexico.
Ghosn talked about that also, at CES: “The collaboration with Mercedes is going very well. Obviously, because it is a development platform, it will change. So yes, we started with this platform, then we discovered that it isn’t the best, so we change platforms. This does not mean that the collaboration stops. Every time we make a change in the project, it doesn’t mean that the project is dead. It’s just that we try to optimize as much as possible for the consumer. The collaboration will continue” he said.
