With the launch of the new 2018 Leaf, America will see its first iteration of Nissan’s ProPilot Assist semi-autonomous technology, which bowed on the Japan-market Nissan Serena followed by the Qashqai crossover in Europe. It’s a relatively simple system in terms of hardware, consisting of forward-looking radar and a number of ultrasonic sensors synced to a single-lens camera, rather than the more sophisticated stereo-vision cameras used by Mercedes-Benz, among others.
Press the blue ProPilot button on the steering wheel to engage the system. Then, when you’ve reached the desired speed, hit the “set” button as you would for bog-standard cruise control. Adjust the distance between your vehicle and the car in front by thumbing a button on the left side of the wheel, and let the system read the lines and steer for you. That’s it, cost-conscious EV enthusiast! Welcome to your little corner of the self-driving future!
There are, however, a few caveats. First, your hands largely need to remain on the wheel, lest you be beset by audiovisual alerts. If you’ve got the wipers going, the system won’t engage. Even if you’re only using them in intermittent mode, the system still may shut down, contingent on its ability to detect lane markers in the wet. An intuitive graphic on the dash display illustrates when lane markings are consistently visible to the system. ProPilot can be engaged at speeds from just above a crawl all the way to 90 mph, but low-speed engagement is relegated to operation in traffic. On a clear road, with nobody in front of you, you’ll need to be traveling at least 20 mph to activate it.
We sampled ProPilot Assist on and around the freeways of Las Vegas, and we must admit, for a system with a relatively rudimentary hardware set, it works quite well. We were especially impressed with its ability to find and hold a line through long, arcing freeway bends without doing anything in the way of meandering between the lane markers. However, drivers must still be aware of changes in lane conditions. For example, when a single lane splits into two, you’re going to need to steer. Manual intervention also is required in stop-and-go traffic if a line of cars grinds to a halt for more than three seconds. To get moving, simply tap the accelerator or the “resume” button to continue forward progress.
ProPilot is hardly a set-it-and-forget-it magic bullet to allow endless futzing with one’s mobile devices while on the go, but what it does—keep the car centered in a given lane during the monotony of American freeway driving—it does pretty well. Just don’t expect it to take your entire commute off your hands. Coming in “2018 or 2019,” notes Ken Kcomt, Nissan’s director of product planning, is a more advanced system that will allow the car to change lanes for you. That will be followed by “full-intersection, city-type autonomy” in 2020 or 2021. Meanwhile, Nissan is making use of what it has already developed. “Later this year,” said Kcomt, “there will be another announcement of a different model that will get [this current version of ProPilot].”
To trot out the hoary old William Gibson line, “The future’s already here—it’s just not evenly distributed.” Nissan is working to fix that with some measure of haste. Given that this initial, limited version of ProPilot Assist works as well as it does, we’re anxious to see what’s next.
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