Nissan is going out of this world with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration with a five-year program that will explore several different futuristic driving systems, including autonomous cars, network-enabled applications, human-machine interfaces and software analysis. They will also be working on a fleet of autonomous zero emission cars, who prototypes should be up and running by the end of the year.
This is the first collaboration of its kind and makes one wonder why it hasn’t happened before. Nissan has been on the forefront of new innovative technologies for the past several years, so this new partnership should definitely be a giant leap for humankind in terms of new car tech.
"The work of NASA and Nissan – with one directed to space and the other directed to earth, is connected by similar challenges," Carlos Ghosn, president and CEO of Nissan Motor Co., said in a press release. "The partnership will accelerate Nissan's development of safe, secure and reliable autonomous drive technology that we will progressively introduce to consumers beginning in 2016 up to 2020.”
Nissan’s 2020 goal is pretty ambitious, which is why this partnership makes even more sense, as NASA is pretty good and putting self-driving rovers on distant planets. As for NASA, the agency will be gaining access to Nissan’s robust prototyping systems, as well as their robotic software test beds and component developments.
This is a very exciting new collaboration and we can’t wait to see what new innovations Nissan and NASA come up with. Like Mr. Ghosn says above, we should be seeing new autonomous systems as early as next year, so stayed tuned to our blog to find out about all the new car tech coming your way in the next few years!