WHATCAR ADVICE
AUTONOMY TAKES A QUANTUM LEAF
The technology in this much-modified electric Nissan enables full driverless control, even on the UK’s most challenging roads. We’ve been for a ride to find out how it works… and what happens next
They don’t need a human driver, but the evolvAD cars are supervised for safety
I HELD MY breath as our car approached an oncoming 44-tonne lorry and passed just a few feet to the left of it; each vehicle was doing around 55mph on the narrow country lane. I needn’t have worried, though, because the car I was in bristled with technology that enables it to genuinely drive itself along rural roads – with absolutely no human intervention.
The two-year-old Nissan Leaf in our images is one of two autonomous vehicles (AVs) that have been developed in the evolvAD project, (AD signifying autonomous driving) – the third and final phase of an eight-year, 16,000-mile self-driving research programme conducted by Nissan and four partners. A reassuring statistic that I kept in mind as the Leaf safely passed that truck is that all those self-driving miles were completed without a single accident.
Before evolvAD, true driverless cars (such as the fleet of self-driving Jaguar I-Paces operated by ride-share platform Waymo) have largely been confined to the spacious city streets and open roads typical of the US. Those are a far cry from the UK’s rural roads and residential streets, which are among the most challenging environments that a driver has to deal with.
On many country roads, the markings that the driver aids (such as lane-keeping assistance) fitted to many of today’s cars rely on for road positioning are either worn or non-existent, and the edges of the roads themselves can be poorly defined – or obscured in bad weather.
Among the challenges that our suburban streets pose for self-driving cars are that they can be unexpectedly narrowed by parked cars, criss-crossed by unpredictable pedestrians, and strewn with obstacles for the car to negotiate. In the absence of a human driver’s eyes and brain to deal with these factors, a car needs to recognise and process the hazards some other way if it is to truly drive itself on any road.