The car you see here looks like your ordinary Nissan Ariya with an extra piece of plastic pasted to the roof, but it's actually the future of effortless mobility called the ProPilot Prototype. According to Nissan, it's a Level 2 Plus driving assistant, but in reality it's a Level 4 eyes-off fully-autonomous car that can drive itself without any human intervention, and I would not have believed that previous sentence if I had not experienced it with my own two eyeballs.
In the interest of transparency, I did not think that true driverless cars would arrive in my lifetime. There's just too much standing in the way, the least of which is the reason nobody is willing to commit to the term 'Level 4'. Anything above Level 3 requires an automaker to take responsibility for any accidents or incidents, and in most parts of the world this kind of legislation hasn't even been written yet. Quite simply, automakers are scared of taking responsibility, because they know there are so many variables out on the road.
Yet, here we are in 2026, and I've just experienced the future of commuting.
What Has Changed To Make Autonomous Driving A Reality?
The answer is two words: Artificial Intelligence. Unless you've been living under a rock, you must have interacted with artificial intelligence at some point in the last two years. What started off as a party trick is now an accepted tool used in almost every industry out there. While people are concerned that it will take the joy (and jobs) out of life, it makes a bit more sense if you think about it laterally. Instead of using it to write a dissertation at university, you can use it as a sort of study buddy to help structure your thoughts, or for basic brainstorming sessions.
Or you could use it to help a car see the world the way a human does. Actually, since the Nissan ProPilot Prototype updates what it sees every 100 milliseconds, it can think faster than a human. And it can learn. Quickly. When Nissan first unleashed these prototypes on the streets of Tokyo, it only took them roughly six weeks to learn the driving culture. As in the average Japanese person will not walk across a pedestrian crossing if the small man is red. And we're talking about a lot of people - roughly 38 million of them in a 5,200 square mile spot in the East. It's the third most population-dense city in the world, and can be quite overwhelming at times.
If you drive here, you don't just have to account for pedestrians, but also motorcycles, other cars, taxis, buses, electric scooters, and electric bicycles. In short, autonomous driving was surely impossible because a billion coders couldn't write a series of ones and zeros fast enough to make them work. But with AI, a car doesn't need code. It has an artificial mind that responds in the same way you and I would.
The AI Uses Prime Hardware
Unlike Tesla's camera-only system, the ProPilot Prototype is equipped with 11 cameras, 5 radar sensors, and LiDAR sensor on the roof. It's packaged neatly, and will look even better on production cars. We're told the hardware can easily be worked into the design of any car, and it can be used by any car with an EPAS steering system. We also assume that it needs some sort of automatic gearbox.
It functions entirely by itself and is not connected to a central server. So, even if the power goes out, the car will not freak out because it has its own onboard brain that will keep it going.
While all of this sounds impressive on paper, the reality might be different. But short of asking this poor prototype to navigate Mumbai by itself, Tokyo is the next toughest challenge.
How Do You Test Drive An Autonomous Car?
Well, it was the easiest test drive of my life. I just had to sit back and relax. I assume it's the same method people use to test hot tubs.
To be clear, Nissan set that car's navigation, but it had to do all the driving. The navigation system is pretty basic compared to everything mentioned above, and is the same unit you'll find in a stock Ariya. It just tells the car where to go, and that's about it. Other than that, Nissan had no control over what the car would do.
To make it even trickier for the car, Nissan sent us on our merry way to "test" the car at some of Tokyo's busiest intersections right around the time all the schools came out for the day. It was about as busy as it gets, and if you've ever been to Japan, you'll know how intimidating that can be.
The driver in me would love to tell you just how much Nissan's prototype autonomous car sucked, and how I would have done things differently, but that would be lying. It navigated unexpected roadworks, crossed busy intersections while waiting for pedestrians, and was capable of perfectly judging an amber light. It could even brake the car at a traffic light without the car jerking back and forth, which is a pet peeve when I happen to ride shotgun with a person.
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This article originally appeared on CarBuzz and is republished here with permission.
