Renault-Nissan Alliance Chairman Carlos Ghosn brags that the company has sold more cars with adaptive safety than anyone. Nissan’s ProPilot system stops the car if a vehicle ahead stops quickly and it keeps the car in its lane.
That system was developed on the way to a full autonomous system, Ghosn said in an interview earlier this year. Right now, Nissan is testing a fully-autonomous car in Palo Alto, California. Renault recently showed off a long, sleek, copper-colored concept car called the Symbioz that can go 80 miles per hour in full self-drive mode.
The car still requires a driver to turn on autonomous mode, at which point the steering wheel retracts. With electric motors in front and back and measuring a lane-hogging six feet in width and 16 feet in length, Symbioz isn’t exactly the car that will go on sale.
In March, Nissan tested an electric Leaf in a ride-hailing pilot in Yokohama, and Renault will do the same later this year in suburban Paris and Rouen with the electric Renault Zoe.
While the alliance's technology is impressive, Ghosn sounds cautious. The French-Japanese conglomerate plans to test a self-driver on the road around 2020. That car will be on highways requiring only occasional driver intervention. By 2022, Renault-Nissan will have fully autonomous cars in the road, according to the Alliance 2022 plan.
“We will all be coming to market with this by 2022,” Ghosn said. “You’ll see all of the carmakers with some level of autonomy.”
Audi, the luxury brand owned by Volkswagen AG, already has the most advanced autonomous car for sale in the A8. The car’s Traffic Jam Pilot uses Lidar to see the road and lets drivers go completely hands-free at speeds up to 37 miles per hour.
The company’s future work promises to be much more advanced. Audi, which is working with Nvidia, is targeting a fully autonomous car in 2020; the report from BNEF put the date to reach Level 4 at 2021. The company hasn’t said whether it will be tested in a service or by its own engineers.
Volkswagen also has an agreement with Aurora, the startup whose founders have serious cred in the world of self-driving software. Its technical leaders are Urmson, a founder of Google’s self-driving effort, Sterling Anderson, who ran Tesla’s Autopilot program, and Drew Bagnell, formerly a leader on Uber’s autonomy team. The company has kept mum as to how it will go to market.
Following the Pack
BMW has a fleet of about 40 cars that can drive at Level 4 autonomy. The cars are driving around Munich and in California.