Nissan of Japan alongside NASA will be pitting their brains together to work on an utopian dream that some companies like Google have already have an interest in – self-driving cars. Hailing from Yokohama, Japan, Nissan alongside NASA’s engineers at Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, will team up in a five-year research-and-development partnership for autonomous vehicle systems – and if all goes well, such advancements can be applied to commercially sold cars.
Nissan is definitely more than excited about the potential explosion of self-driving cars, which could result in better safety, not to mention do its bit such as drive around disabled people to their destination without a hitch. Nissan hopes to roll out autonomous driving technology to the masses some time between 2016 and 2020, and considering the brains at Ames were the ones that developed the Mars rover software and robots on-board the International Space Station, it looks like this partnership could very well end up as a fruitful one.
Other automakers that are looking into this particular technology would be Nissan’s rivals Toyota, alongside General Motors and Ford over in the US. Well, with cars already knowing how to park themselves, it is only a matter of time when self-driving cars become reality and accepted. I wonder how the existing road infrastructure will be modified to accommodate this new class of people movers.
Filed in . Read more about NASA and Nissan. Source: charlotteobserver