Nissan’s keynote at CES in Las Vegas was kind of disappointing. The company was rumored to unveil its first long-range all-electric vehicle to compete against GM’s Chevy Bolt EV and Tesla’s Model 3. Instead, the company only confirmed that the vehicle is coming “in the near future”.
It looks we will have to wait a little while longer, but maybe not too long since Nissan is also holding an event in Detroit next week.
Another new information to come out of the event is that the company is now calling it “the new LEAF” – meaning that it’s still going to be a LEAF and not a new vehicle program like some speculated.
The event revolved mostly around Nissan’s ADAS and autonomous technology. The first iteration of that is the ProPilot, a level 2 autonomous system already in some LEAFs in Japan, and CEO Carlos Ghosn confirmed that the upcoming “new LEAF” will be equipped with the technology:
In addition to advancements in Nissan’s autonomous driving strategy, Ghosn also announced plans to launch a new Nissan LEAF, with ProPILOT technology, enabling autonomous drive functionality for single-lane highway driving. This new LEAF will build on the company’s leadership in electric vehicles, which includes having sold more than 250,000 Nissan LEAFs sold worldwide since 2010. Ghosn said the new LEAF is coming in the near future and represents the next chapter of Nissan Intelligent Power.
ProPILOT is only the beginning of Nissan’s autonomous program. The company plans to release gradually more advanced semi-autonomous features leading to full autonomy in 2020.
The company displayed a prototype at CES:
You can watch the presentation in full here and video of what the company think the autonomous driving technology will look like in 2020:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKoC9k5b3uo
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