Driverless cars will require industry shift, Nissan scientist says The Japan Times

LOS ANGELES – Automakers intending to develop driverless cars need to work as much on software design as mechanical engineering, according to the researcher leading Nissan Motor Co.'s automated-vehicle program. Making cars that are "deliberative" in assessing road conditions, rather than just reactive, requires artificial intelligence, said Maarten Sierhuis, director of Nissan's Silicon Valley research center in Sunnyvale, California. Nissan, which aims to sell vehicles that can drive themselves by 2020 or sooner, is developing software to read and filter sensor data much as a human brain does, he said. "What the auto industry has to come to is a shift from thinking about the car as a physical, mechanical system," Sierhuis said in an interview Tuesday at the Automated Vehicles Symposium in San Francisco. "Autonomy, autonomous systems, is about understanding how humans do that, and then replicating it with software."