Ghosn also stressed Nissan’s dedication to using the Leaf for energy distribution. He talked about electric vehicles that can supply power to homes, buildings or even the grid itself. When Nissan’s new European HQ opens, it will be partly powered by vehicle-to-building and vehicle-to-grid tech.
Nissan plans to launch a system it calls Seamless Autonomous Mobility. It’s a workaround solution for what to do when the first generation of true autonomous cars encounter situations they may not be able to handle.
Its autonomous cars would be linked to a command center. If the car encounters a problem — say, a roadblock where police are using hand signals to reroute cars over double yellow lines — the car pulls over and signals to the command center that it needs help.
An actual human (called a mobility manager) in that center will look at vehicle images and sensor data to determine how to handle it, and the car will be under the manager’s control until the manager leaves it to its own devices, pun intended.
As these calls continue to come in, the SAM system learns how the managers react to certain situations, and eventually, a SAM car would be able to broadcast those solutions to other cars, eventually creating an autonomous path through or around a given situation.
