Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan and Renault, Reddit AMA on Autonomous Vehicles

On the 13th January 2015 Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Nissan and Renault invited users of the popular social message board website Reddit to ask him any questions. The topic of the question and answer session was ostensibly Nissan’s autonomous car project, which has famously committed to delivering an autonomous vehicle by 2020, which if you believe the hype, is probably the most advanced effort from a conventional car manufacturer. Unfortunately most of the questions were not on topic, so much of the thread was taken up by questions on F1, fuel cells, how to get a leg up in the automotive industry etc. However the thread did contain a few insights about Nissan’s take on vehicle autonomy.

When asked:

Automated driving will be extremely disruptive in shipping and taxi service. Have you given any thought to these macro-economic effects?

Carlos replied:

We are not promoting driverless cars. We are more into autonomous drive technology with the driver, so this should have no macro-economic impact.

What Carlos is saying here is that Nissan is in the driver assisted technology market. This is significant because full autonomy has a much greater disruptive impact than driver assist technology, or as Carlos would put it ‘autonomous drive technology’. Full autonomy means that you can replace the driver entirely, which opens the field to fleets of Shared Autonomous Vehicles. According to one study every SAV on the road will replace 11 conventional cars. Could this be the reason that the CEO of two of the world’s biggest conventional car manufacturers is not pushing for full autonomy?

When asked:

Often when you hear “autonomous vehicles”, it is in the same sentence with Google. How do you see the search giant’s role in the future of autonomous vehicles?

Carlos replied:

…
The Google car is more of a driverless car than an autonomous car. It would serve more of an economic purpose. Consider, for example, if Uber was able to drive their cars without drivers. There would be an economic purpose.
We are much more involved in autonomous drive. The driver is still in the car, but we want to make sure to make the driving experience is less stressful. We’re giving more power to the driver, to make the driving experience more pleasant.

Here Carlos is trying to redefine the term autonomous (he also has an interesting take on the term economic. If Google’s motivation is ‘economic’ then I would suggest Nissan’s is ‘commercial’). The accepted term for what Carlos is talking about here is Driver Assist Technology. If Nissan’s intention is to retain the requirement for a driver then the vehicle is not fully autonomous. However it is clear Nissan view vehicle autonomy as a spectrum, which is what Carlos touches on next.

When asked:

What do you see as the bigger barrier to widespread use of autonomous vehicles, regulatory issues or customer acceptance?

Carlo replied:

You have different waves of autonomous drive. To make it simple, wave 1 is valet parking, wave 2 is autonomous driving on a highway without passing. Wave 3 would be city driving.
Customer acceptance for the first waves is very high. Regulators are going to be much tougher to allow taking hands off the wheel or eyes off the road. In my opinion, regulators are going to be a much tougher sell than customer acceptance.

Here Carlos neatly outlines Nissan’s stepwise approach to rolling out vehicle autonomy. He also posits two alternative, and strong, reasons for concentrating on driver assist technology as opposed to full autonomy. Government regulation and customer acceptance, or regulatory barriers and the uck factor. (Above I suggested a more cynical economic reason for the CEO of two car manufacturers to want more cars on the road).

We’ve already seen that when Google tried to roll out a fully autonomous (no steering wheel) prototype that the regulators slapped them down; we also know that Google are investing heavily in lobbying. Google clearly also see regulators as the most significant barrier. By concentrating on driver assisted technology Nissan are taking a less confrontational, more gradual, approach which could pay dividends.

When asked:

As lab partners go, NASA is hard to beat. From Nissan’s point of view, what areas of research will this partnership benefit? CES showed how competitive this field is — do you expect collaboration with NASA to give you the edge? And if so, how?

Carlos replied:

First, yes, we expect that collaboration with NASA will give us an edge. The main domain of collaboration is going to be technologies about remote control, where NASA is second to none.
Second, there are the technologies and know-how they have in terms of human-machine interface, and human systems interface. NASA has an experience and knowledge second to none.
Third, NASA has a research center with a proving ground and they opened this campus to our cars. We will be able to test our cars in real life on their proving grounds.
On top of this, there is the excellence of their engineering that will also us to work together on issues related to autonomous drive.

This is an interesting and potentially fruitful partnership. There is a lot of work being done on autonomy in Mars Rover type vehicles. Currently rovers have to wait for signals to do the round trip to earth before they get their next instruction, future rovers will be able to drive themselves meaning they’ll be able to get more done in their limited time on another planet.