Nissan Helps Completes Large Scale Autonomous Driving Project
Nissan has played a key role in helping to complete the largest autonomous driving research project seen to date in the UK.
Nissan worked alongside Connected Places Catapult, Humanising Autonomy, SBD Automotive and TRL on the evolvAD programme, which was designed to bring autonomous driving (AD) closer to reality.
It follows on from Nissan’s HumanDrive and ServCity programmes, with more than 16,000 miles of accident-free autonomous driving has now been completed over an eight year period.
That driving includes mileage on a wide variety of different roads, ranging from motorways and country roads to city centres and residential streets.
"All three research projects have been tremendously successful in driving our knowledge and understanding of how AD technology performs across challenging driving environments,” David Moss, Senior Vice President, Region Research & Development for Nissan Africa, Middle East, India, Europe and Oceania said.
"It has been a privilege working with our dedicated partners to advance AD mobility. As well as making driving safer by reducing human error, and cleaner by improving efficiency, this technology can give many more people access to mobility who may not have it today due to location, age or disability.
"Our talented UK team at Nissan Technical Centre Europe in Cranfield will continue developing this technology, and we're excited to bring AD mobility services to customers in the coming years."
The evolvAD programme saw Nissan utilise a fleet of LEAF models that were equipped with autonomous technology to run on private test tracks before taking up the unique challenges provided by things like single lane residential roads and windy country routes without road markings.
"Following the successful conclusion of evolvAD and previous projects, we are now shifting towards studying the readiness of the UK to introduce AD systems,” Robert Bateman, evolvAD Project Manager said.
"Again, working with partners, we need to develop a 360-degree understanding of infrastructure and regulatory needs across the country, and provide critical insights to policy-makers and urban planners to ensure a successful introduction of AD mobility services in the right way and at the right time."