Behind me lays the town of Silicon Valley, right in the middle of the state California, USA.
As a car enthusiast, I've got mixed feelings about this place.
Because if there's one place in the world, where you can still enjoy having 6- and 8-cylinder engines in the front of your car,
it's the States. That wouldn't be the case if it was up to the companies in the valley,
because they're really trying to change the future of cars. And that makes me curious as a journalist,
because there are a lot of stories to be told here.
That's why we're diving into Silicon Valley; What is the future of the car?
In this episode, we're returning to Sunnyvale.
Just down the road of Mercedes-Benz, we find the Nissan Research Center,
where the Japanese company is working on the future of autonomous driving, led by Dutchman Maarten Sierhuis.
Our fellow countryman was on vacation during our visit, but his right-hand man Liam Pedersen explains to us what Nissan is doing exactly.
A system like that is supposed to know, how to handle more complex situations like crashes,
or road works which aren't featured in standard satnav maps. Besides the question if we would want such technology,
Nissan thinks even the smartest autonomous systems, can't function without human interference.
To find an answer to those questions, Nissan utilizes the knowledge that Sierhuis and Pedersen have gained during their time at NASA.
At NASA, Sierhuis and Pedersen developed a system, which could remotely help the Mars-rover from the NASA Control Center on Earth.
Under the name Seamless Autonomous Mobility, or SAM for short,
Nissan is using a modified version of the NASA-system, to help autonomous cars in difficult traffic situations.
From the control room in Sunnyvale, a so-called mobility manager can intervene whenever that's necessary.
For example: in one of the autonomous Leaf's, which Nissan has codenamed Charlie.
Just to clear some things up; a few miles from here there's a Nissan Leaf driving autonomously,
which is connected to system through the cloud, and the car is being monitored.
In the future, Nissan will employ mobility managers, which all monitor a few cars.
That way, they make sure autonomous Nissans stay on the roads, safely and quickly.
According to Liam Pedersen and his team, this is the only way to make autonomous driving succeed right now.
And, it's almost ready for serial production.
A sort of callcenter to prevent autonomous cars getting stuck in traffic,
it might sound like a temporary solution, but according to Nissan it's the only way to a safe future.