Nissan, NASA partner to develop driverless cars on Earth and Mars

NISSAN North America and NASA’s Ames Research Center announced Thursday, Jan. 8, a five-year partnership to develop driverless vehicles that can navigate on Earth and Mars.

Engineers from both groups will work together at the Nissan research facility in Silicon Valley to develop new technology that can be used in both cars and space rovers.

“This is a very exciting collaboration,” said Ames Research Center Director Pete Worden, according to San Jose Mercury News. “We’re finding in a lot of different areas that the private sector has come up with some pretty clever solutions that we haven’t thought of.”

The companies plan to start testing vehicles NASA’s research center in Mountain View, Calif. by the end of the year.

Nissan has already begun testing autonomous cars at its research facility in Sunnyvale and has pledged to introduce driverless cars that can navigate in “nearly all situations” by 2020.

The automaker believes it will benefit from the partnership with NASA, which possesses space vehicles that are successfully able to self-navigate millions of miles away from Earth. Nissan spokesman Jeff Kuhlman said the company hopes it will learn how to build this type of reliability and technology into its own cars.

“The work of NASA and Nissan – with one directed to space and the other directed to earth, is connected by similar challenges,” said Carlos Ghosn, president and CEO of Nissan Motor Co., in a statement. “The partnership will accelerate Nissan’s development of safe, secure and reliable autonomous drive technology that we will progressively introduce to consumers beginning in 2016 up to 2020.”

The Nissan Leaf will be used to test autonomous car technology.

NASA is also expected to gain from the new relationship. Worden told Wired that obstacles on Mars, such as craters and rocks, can be overcome with the help of better driverless technology. Nissan has already showcased advanced technology through vehicles that are able to detect road conditions and automatically operate main controls, such as accelerating and braking.

Nissan joins six other companies that have obtained permits from the California Department of Motor Vehicles to test autonomous cars: Bosch, Delphi Automotive, Google, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla and Volkswagen.

(With reports from Forbes, NBC, New York Daily News and San Jose Mercury News)