THE JORUNEY TO 'SELF-DRIVING' CARS

Fully autonomous Nissan cars could be on UK roads by 2028 as a mobility service. We trial the project's latest developments

- Alistair Crooks

IT'S tough to know if autonomous driving is coming or going sometimes. The idea of cars driving themselves has been around for decades and plenty of brands have set ambitious dates for launching 'driverless vehicles'. Many of these haven't seeing the light of day due to costs, technological barriers, customer demand or, in many cases, governmental red tape.

There are some regions around the world that already have this tech roaming the roads, but thanks in part to tight regulations, it's yet to roll out to the general public here in the UK. However, as we've recently experienced courtesy of Nissan's European Technical Centre in Cranfield, Beds, that doesn't mean fully autonomous cars aren't already on our streets in some capacity.

Nissan has recently completed its latest stage of autonomous driving research, called 'evolvAD'. It brings to an end an intensive eight-year testing period, which not only saw more than 16,000 miles of self-driving on British roads, but also the record for the furthest autonomous journey (230 miles from Milton Keynes to Sunderland) and, reassuringly for us considering we're about to experience this tech first-hand, zero accidents.

Nissan started this project in 2017 under the 'HumanDrive' stage, which saw autonomous cars (based on the first-generation Leaf) take to Britain's motorways, a relatively easy environment for autonomy to work in. Next up was 'ServCity' from 2020 to 2023 in Woolwich, London, to give Nissan real-world data on autonomous urban driving. Linking these two motoring scenarios was 'evolvAD', which ran from 2023 to early 2025, focusing on arterial roads heading to rural areas.