A self-driving Nissan Leaf car took to the streets of London on Monday for the imprint’s first European tests of an autonomous vehicle.
the UK has been wooing developers of autonomous vehicles, hoping to grab a slice of an industry it estimates could be worth 900 billion pounds ($1.1 trillion) worldwide by 2025. It also recently announced changes to allow for a single insurance policy to cover motorists driving conventionally and in autonomous mode, as it tries to get law in place to encourage the uptake of driverless cars by 2020.
Britain’s flexible approach to testing autonomous vehicles helped Nissan pick London for its first European tests, Maarten Sierhuis, the director of its research center in Silicon Valley told Reuters.
“It’s not everywhere in Europe that we can go and drive on the road,” Sierhuis said.
“You don’t want to go to the most difficult parts of London when you start. The system has to be tested,” he said of the east of the capital where the trials are taking place near the ExCeL exhibition center and London City Airport.
Nissan worked with Transport for London and the police ahead of the trials, supplying details of its route and the rules it would follow. The Car keeps was a full log that it would share with the government in the event of an incident.
The car moves from conventional to self-driving mode at the touch of the button ‘Enter’ and a screen identifies the nearest vehicles to the car in red and green, also showing the speed the car is travelling.
Nearly two dozen cameras, radars and lasers are fitted on the top and around the side of vehicle to guide its path.
Nissan launched a version of its self-driving technology dubbed ProPILOT last year in Japan and plans to offer the feature in the Qashqai crossover in Europe this year.
