Nissan and Mobileye are teaming up on ProPilot 2.0

Enlarge Image ProPilot 2.0 allows for hands-free driving on the highway and that ability is powered by Mobileye’s EyeQ4 SOC. Nissan’s ProPilot Assist was one of the first super-advanced driver-aid suites to be made widely available in an affordable car. It worked well when we tested it, and we were pretty excited when Nissan announced it was working on a Version 2.0.

Now we know that Nissan’s not doing Version 2.0 by itself, and that has us even more excited — because it’s working with Intel’s Mobileye to power its hands-off freeway driving feature. Mobileye announced the partnership, along with a similar partnership with China’s NIO on Thursday.

“The release of Nissan’s ProPilot 2.0 and the updated NIO Pilot is a significant milestone in the advancement of vehicle autonomy,” said Professor Amnon Shashua, president and CEO of Mobileye, in a statement. “Mobileye is honored to be a trusted partner in both production launches, and we look forward to their debuts demonstrating to the world the potential of ADAS equipped with Mobileye’s EyeQ4.”

Specifically, Mobileye’s EyeQ4 system-on-a-chip will be employed by both Nissan and NIO to do some of the computational heavy lifting on the complicated task of safely allowing hands-off, navigated highway driving. Nissan’s version gets a further boost, thanks to Mobileye’s RoadBook system .

RoadBook is unique in that it uses aggregated data from vehicles around the world and across a range of manufacturers (so long as they’re equipped with an EyeQ4 system, which Mobileye estimates will be around 20 million vehicles in the next few years) to create high-definition maps for use in self-driving. Nissan will be the first manufacturer to employ the system en masse.

Mobileye and Nissan already worked together on a project in 2018 to map all 15,000 miles of Japan’s expressways using an earlier version of RoadBook, and because the maps are being continuously updated and added to in almost real-time, these maps can be used in the development of autonomous vehicles.

Source: www.cnet.com