While nobody really wants to be the first to bring you fully autonomous cars, luxury brands like Volvo and Tesla already put semi-autonomous drive into their cars as standard. Renault-Nissan wants to do the same in the next four years, but at a much lower price range.
The alliance is set to launch more than 10 affordable cars with autonomous technologies in the United States, Japan, China and Europe by 2020.
If you like statistics, Renault-Nissan delivers, saying that fatal and serious injuries in Nissans in Japan decreased 61 percent in 20 years, while with Renaults in France, the improvement is 80 percent in 15 years. But they can go much further that that by reducing the chance of a driver error, which is responsible for up to 90 percent of all fatalities. The idea of bringing that to zero isn’t new.
While the steering wheels will stay right where they belong, Renault-Nissan will introduce ‘single lane control’ as early as in this year, followed by ‘multi lane control’ in 2018, a system that will make autonomous highway drive possible.
Then, the big one comes in 2020. “Intersection autonomy” will be your friend in city traffic. As long as they put giant cupholders in their cars as well, Renault-Nissan might just hit the nail on the head with this.
Photo credit: Nissan, Renault
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