Well, I’m not sure I’d call that unit a steering “wheel,” but Nissan does on their new autonomous driving concept, the IDS. If you’re going to ride around in a car that drives itself sometimes, I guess it had better be interesting, right?
The Tokyo Motor Show Concept looks like a hyper-aggressive Leaf from 10 years into the future. This makes sense, as it’s an electric car with a 60 kWh battery, double what you get in a Leaf. It’s ultra-lightweight, thanks to a body that makes liberal use of carbon fiber.
But the big killer app is how it switches from Piloted Drive to Manual Drive, which results in a transformation of the interior. The seats rotate forward, the emoji-smiling iPad unit goes away, and the steering wheel swings out along with a new HUD. Two interiors at the touch of a button. That’s clever.
Nissan says this is the future of where their cars specifically and cars in general are going—electric and autonomous, zero emissions and zero fatalities. “Two zeroes,” they call it, with autonomous tech on various production cars by 2020.
Meet the future, I guess.
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