Geneva, Switzerland — March 6, 2016 — Nissan has announced that its first Piloted Drive vehicle will be available in Europe starting in 2017. Nissan says its 2017 Nissan Qashqai will become the first Piloted Drive vehicle available in Europe.
“Autonomous technologies have been part of our R&D activities for a long time, we’ve done extensive and ongoing on-road testing since 2013,” says Daniele Schillaci, Executive Vice President, Global Marketing and Sales at Nissan. “This verified the integrity and versatility of Nissan’s Piloted Drive engineering in real-world scenarios.”
Nissan has also announced it will launch multiple vehicles with autonomous drive technology in the next four years in Europe, the US, Japan and China. A statement from the company says the technology will be installed on mainstream, mass-market cars at affordable prices and the first model will come to Japan this year. An on-road demo event in Europe in 2016 will showcase the maturity of Nissan’s autonomous drive technology.
The announcements are part of a larger framework, Nissan’s Intelligent Mobility project. Intelligent Mobility has three core areas: Intelligent Driving, spearheaded by Nissan’s autonomous drive technology, Piloted Drive; Intelligent Power, focused on efficiency and electric vehicles, and Intelligent Integration, which looks at new links between vehicles and society.
“Our Intelligent Mobility vision is a framework to move customers around the world towards a safer and more sustainable future,” says Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan. “To realize this vision, Nissan has launched a long-term strategy, supported by significant R&D investments. This enabled Nissan to introduce the breakthrough LEAF, the world’s first mass production EV, in 2010, years before any of our competitors. It has also driven our development of cutting-edge autonomous drive technologies, which will be available in a range of mass production models by 2020. These steps are allowing Nissan to deliver the benefits of EV and autonomous drive innovations to as many customers as possible and, ultimately, to lead the way toward a new era of mobility.”
For more information, please visit nissan-global.com/EN. Check out the video below for more on Nissan’s Intelligent Mobility vision.
