ProPilot Assist by Nissan is considered one of the first super-advanced driver-aid suites made available in affordable cars. Several tests of the system concluded that it works well with drivers, but now it's been made better. The company announced there would be a Version 2.0.
What's different this time around is that Nissan enlisted the help of Intel's Mobileye to work on its hand-off freeway driving feature. Version 2.0 is a collaborative work by the two companies, as announced by Mobileye on Thursday.
In a statement by President and CEO of Mobileye Professor Amnon Shashua, the company expressed its gratitude to be working with Nissan.
"The release of Nissan's ProPilot 2.0 and the updated NIO Pilot is a significant milestone in the advancement of vehicle autonomy," Shashua said. "Mobileye is honored to be a trusted partner in both production launches, and we look forward to their debuts demonstrating to the world the potential of ADAS equipped with Mobileye's EyeQ4."
Mobileye's EyeQ4 system-on-a-chip is going to be used by NIO and Nissan to allow safe driving in hands-off, navigated highway driving. ProPilot Assist 2.0 is now much better, thanks to Mobileye's RoadBook system.
RoadBook is a system that aggregates data from vehicles across the world from different manufacturers that employ an Eye Q4 system. According to Mobileye, this system gathers data from approximately 20 million cars in order to generate high-definition maps for users to use while the car is in self-driving mode. Nissan will be the first car maker to use the system en masse.
Nissan promises to bring self-driving systems to highways by 2020.
Self-driving systems have been tainted with liability issues, following Uber and Tesla's mishaps and legal cases when their self-driving cars were involved in fatal crashes. To keep drivers alert and wake, facial recognition is employed, while systems can scan and map roadways and highways better.
In the next five years, Nissan expects to outfit 20 models to help the company achieve its full highway automation goal. The models to be used are yet to be announced, but all of them are sure to have hands-off tech that promotes safer driving.
This is not the first collaborative work for Nissan and Mobileye, having worked previously to map Japan's expressways in 2018. The team used an earlier version of RoadBook, which is constantly being updated so that it can be used to make autonomous driver safer and better.
