It may sound obvious, but a vehicle’s overall safety is so important that innovation in its regard should never stop. Looking to break away from the mold of air bags and crumple zones, Nissan is planning ahead to see if one not-so-tried concept could be the ticket to reduce accidents. According to Bob Yakushi, Nissan’s senior manager of auto safety engineering, the automaker is working with other manufactures on a communication system that could not only link a vehicle with an infrastructure, but a whole other car.
“Nissan has a vision of ultimately having no accidents and no fatalities. And so to accomplish that type of ultimate goal, we have Nissan’s Safety Shield,” said Yakushi. Acting like a sort of “black box”, the system uses various monitors to address normal driving when a risk hasn’t and has appeared, before a crash, during a crash and post crash. The system has created such technologies as forward collision warning, lane departure warning and prevention, blind-spot monitoring/intervention and back-up intervention. To push such safety innovations even further, Nissan wants to put them into a highly predictable all-vehicle system that would ultimately have the ability to communicate to other cars and trucks on the road.
“Well, how about cars talking to cars, vehicle-to-vehicle communications. As we move in that direction, ultimately this type of communication between vehicles can help mitigate and reduce the risk of injury. We are working pre-competitively with other OEMs to develop a vehicle-to-vehicle, or vehicle-to-infrastructure type communication system to help go toward that zero accident vision that NISSAN has,” said Yakushi.
Source: Nissan
