What if you didn’t have a driving license, or maybe you don’t even have one yet? Nowadays, it’s really hard or very uncomfortable to move from one place to another without knowing how to drive. Learning to drive a car could completely transform your life. But what if you didn’t need to learn? What if you would ride in your own car without even having to drive it yourself, and nobody else, whatsoever? Driving without a driver might not be so far-fetched as it sounds. Nissan and Nasa have teamed-up to create the perfect driver-less car.  It’s the unbelievable motivation that feeds the hardworking minds of engineers and scientists all over the world.

Let’s get straight to business: Nissan and its famous collaborator, NASA, want to unite their knowledge of the skies and the Earth in order to achieve the first auto driven car, in the year 2019-2020. It does seem like a dream come true, doesn’t it ? The good news is that they already started the project and have tested some models, although these models are still incomplete and under construction.

Nissan revealed the Q50, that is already available with adaptive cruise control. We’re talking about Linux operating systems, a high-tech display, flat screen and an unbelievable sum of detailed electronic devices. There are two models tested, one with a Velodyne unit and one without it, a gadget estimated at about $70 000, especially designed to take the range view to a whole other level.

It’s a LIDAR, the new RADAR : Light Detection And Raging – it creates maps around the car in real time. Without it, the car wouldn’t know how to react around pedestrians, stop signs, construction, parked cars and double trucks, how to adjust to road changes and other obstacles.
Another issue would be the approach of Google in self-driving cars, which is rather different than autonomous driving as Nissan wants to call it. The project of Google is based on highly detailed 3D maps of the streets, wanting to teach the cars to function exactly by the model. The problem would be the changes that happen on a certain street constantly and the other moving vehicles and pedestrians.
Nissan engineers say that they have a long way to teach NASA the whole idea and learn together how to complement one another.

The purpose of this new project is to transform the relationship between the driver and the car from a master to slave one, to a complete partnership.
All these ideas and plans have been stated in the CES 2015, where Mercedes and Audi also revealed their plans concerning driver-less cars.
Image Source: Kinja Img