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Fancy a car that can read your mind? Or see behind buildings? Well, that's what Nissan is working towards if its presentations at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) Asia in Shanghai are to be believed.
"At Nissan, we always aim to be ahead of the curve," said Roel De Vries, senior vice president for marketing at Nissan. "We don't just anticipate future trends and technologies, we define them. We believe technology should solve real-world problems and benefit as many people as possible. This is the idea behind Nissan Intelligent Mobility, our vision for moving people to a better world."
This is the first time that Nissan has shown off its Invisible-to-Visible (I2V) technology. Basically, this is a combination of cloud computing and car-to-X cellular communication. The system takes a live feed of data from other cars, from roadside furniture, even from the Internet Of Things, and uses it to calculate and visualise what's around a blind bend, or lurking behind the wall of a building. It combines Nissan's existing automated driving tech, ProPILOT, which delivers information about the environment around the vehicle; along side that is Omni-Sensing technology which provides real-time traffic data; and SAM (Seamless Autonomous Mobility) technology analyses real-time data about the road environment. The system was recently field tested at Nissan's proving ground in Yokosuka, Japan, using 5G mobile communications technology.
Nissan's Brain-to-Vehicle (B2V) tech we've seen before in prototype form, but the version being shown off at CES Asia is a little more evolved. Basically, it uses electrodes mounted in a wearable device to scan your brain. It knows which parts of the brain fire up for which muscular movements, so it can anticipate your steering and pedal inputs a fraction of a second before you actually carry them out, and can pre-load the car's safety systems to either help you out, or to prevent you doing something stupid.
Nissan will also show off its IMs crossover sports saloon concept at the show. We've seen it before, but when a concept is this good looking, we don't mind seeing it again.
"China is the most exciting market in the world, especially when it comes to technology, so it makes sense for us to showcase these Nissan Intelligent Mobility developments at CES Asia," said Senior Vice President Makoto Uchida, chairman of Nissan's management committee for China. "By developing these technologies, we'll make our customers' lives better and ensure sustainable growth for our business."