Nissan and NASA are extending their research into autonomous mobility services under a new five-year collaboration.

Nissan’s Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM) platform.

Nissan North America is to work with NASA Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley on research and technology development for future autonomous mobility services, including a working demonstration in Silicon Valley.

The partnership will build on the firms’ existing partnership that saw Nissan unveil a new platform – Nissan Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM) – for managing fleets of autonomous vehicles, developed from NASA technology, at last year’s CES. The latest collaboration will further develop the technology and test the use of SAM for managing autonomous transportation services, ahead of public implementations.

“Our goal is to deploy SAM to help third-party organisations safely integrate a fleet of autonomous vehicles in unpredictable urban environments, for example ride-hailing services, public transportation or logistics and delivery services,” said Maarten Sierhuis, director of the Nissan Research Center in Silicon Valley.

“The final stage of our existing research agreement with NASA will bring us closer to that goal and test SAM in a working demonstration on public streets.”

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