Nissan says full autonomous driving is still years away

As the autonomous vehicle industry faces a crisis in the USA, a Nissan self-driving expert has forecast the technology is still years from maturity.

Speaking to carsales at a Nissan technology presentation to media in Japan, Ryota Satoh was downbeat about full autonomy’s prospects.

The senior manager of Nissan Motor Co’s autonomous driving and driver assist systems at the company’s advanced technology engineering department confirmed Nissan has “a vision” for full autonomy but then admitted: “I don’t think anyone can tell [when it will happen].

“But I would say before reaching 2030 would be very ambitious.”

Steering wheels will stay in vehicles “for the foreseeable future”, he added.

Satoh’s conservative forecast was made around the same time US-based General Motors-owned robotaxi company Cruise was halting all driverless vehicle activities.

That came after an October 2 incident in San Francisco in which a Cruise autonomous vehicle ran over and then stopped on a pedestrian before moving off and dragging the victim further down the road.

The pedestrian was hit by the Cruise vehicle after being struck by a human-driven car and thrown into its path.

After an investigation the California Department of Motor Vehicles suspended Cruise’s driverless testing permits in San Francisco.

Cruise’s main rival Waymo continues to operate in San Francisco. The robotaxis use a combination of sensors (camera, radars and lidar) to navigate the environment. They are not geofenced to a set route.

Satoh questioned whether individual robotaxi companies could ever amass the operational capacity to function efficiently.

“In order to operate robotaxi-type systems you have to have a huge back-end system in order to operate,” he said.

“For a single entity or enterprise it might be very difficult to work at that level so there needs to be some kind of reworking of how to run that back-end.

“But the key point is why we would need that is to ensure safety.

“And this is another big challenge the industry is facing if we want to expand.”

Nissan’s latest development test mules are now at SAE Level 3, which still require human driver intervention for complex driving tasks.

Nissan has committed to installing next-generation lidar (light detection and ranging) sensors in new-generation vehicles from 2030.

It has focussed its autonomous developments on safety rather than commercial opportunities as the best way to achieve its autonomous goals.

“We want to make sure that our vehicles are safe,” Satoh said. “This is the foundation of our AD – autonomous driving. We are trying to reach full autonomy at the end of the day but how to get there the fastest?

“We see raising the safety bar is going to be the way to make us reach there the fastest.”

However, Satoh admitted that Nissan’s publicly-stated ambition to eliminate all traffic accidents was not feasible.

“There are five to seven per cent of scenarios that are impossible to avoid,” he admitted.

“There are scenarios when unfortunate individuals would intentionally step in front of a vehicle. It is pure physics… there will be a portion of scenarios that are very difficult to avoid with the current technology and maybe impossible.

“Take that outside of the scope and our target is to cover everything.”

In 2022 carsales covered Nissan’s lidar-led driver assist system developments here. Eighteen months on, Satoh said the latest version of the system can judge whether to brake or accelerate in high-speed cross-traffic situations.

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