Autonomous Driving Tech To Be In Nissan Leaf For Safety Purposes

September 6th, 2013 by Zachary Shahan

Originally published on EV Obsession.

Image Credit: Nissan/Nismo

The new Nissan Leaf is set to have some innovative safety technologies, including laser scanners and cameras that monitor the area around the vehicle, a full 360 degrees, and keep an eye out for things like other vehicles, road signs, and hyperactive EV enthusiasts (okay, maybe not that last one). The creative name for this technology package is: Around View Monitor. (I know, the hottest name ever, right?)

Of course, what use is such technology if it doesn’t do something with the information it receives? The other part of the equation are technologies that react to said risks.

“According to Nissan, the pairing of these technologies enables the car to handle complex real-world road situations such as sensing when a lane is closed on the highway due to road work, turning to avoid oncoming traffic and detecting a parked car on the side of the road, and then helping the car to steer around the obstacle safely,” fender bender writes.

“The innovations being demonstrated at Nissan 360 come from Nissan’s research and development branch with the long term aim to create ‘collision-free cars’ and autonomous driving.”

Pretty cool. Some think Nissan will actually beat Google in the race (can we call it that yet?) to a mass-market “self-driving” vehicle. We’ll see….

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Tags: driverless vehicles, Nissan, Nissan autonomous driving, Nissan crash avoidance, Nissan crash avoidance tech, Nissan driverless vehicles, Nissan Leaf, Nissan safety tech

About the Author

Zachary Shahan spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as the director/chief editor. Otherwise, he's probably enthusiastically fulfilling his duties as the director/editor of Solar Love, EV Obsession, Planetsave, or Bikocity. Zach is recognized globally as a solar energy, electric car, and wind energy expert. If you would like him to speak at a related conference or event, connect with him via social media. You can connect with Zach on any popular social networking site you like. Links to all of his main social media profiles are on ZacharyShahan.com.

Ronald Brakels

Electric cars don’t wear out in the way internal combustion engine cars do so if they can avoid collisions they will have a massive average lifespan. Just one more advantage.
StefanoR99

Self driving car doesn’t sound appealing but a car that can avoid an accident by helping the driver sounds pretty good – as long as it doesn’t interfere and become a “nanny” the driver has to fight against.
- Bob_Wallace
  
  A self-driving car sounds wonderful to me. More and more so every time I’m doing boring hours of driving on highways having to constantly watch for some knucklehead who does something stupid.
  
  Then there are those stop and go traffic jams. Let nanny drive that stuff.
  Oh, and the drunks that have crashed into me, almost killing me one time? Man, would they had been in a self-driving car….
  - StefanoR99
    
    Sure as long as it can be switched off..
    
    And the drunks dont need new tech, they can use old tech of calling a damn taxi…
    - Bob_Wallace
      
      “drunks dont need new tech, they can use old tech of calling a damn tax”
      City-Boy
      - StefanoR99
        
        Nope just British – most of the country is served by mini cabs
Wayne Williamson

maybe this will help get rid of the side view mirrors;-)
Marion Meads

I think it would be better for Nissan to improve its software and hardware for managing its battery life.
Marion Meads

So what’s the OS managing all this?
- Shiggity
  
  I’m pretty sure it’s a modded Linux system.