As I sit down in Nissan's simulator, I prepare myself for the fact that a cohort of researchers could scrutinize my skills as a wheelman with more rigor than the most aggravating backseat driver. And, I accept that this process involves wearing what looks like a too-small, sideways bicycle helmet, which holds 11 electrodes poking through my hair. "For each corner, there'll be an evaluation of your driving smoothness," says Lucian Gheorghe, the Nissan researcher in charge of this rig. Gheorghe is interested in motor related potentials, a specific pattern of activity the brain creates as it prepares to move a limb. It takes half a second for the body to translate that signal to the wave of an arm or kick of a leg, and Nissan wants to exploit the gap.

The world's biggest carmakers and technology companies are spending billions of dollars to perfect your ability to drive without thinking. But Nissan Motor Co. is taking a different direction -- trying to "decode" your thinking so that hands-on driving is more fun. The Japanese company will unveil and test its "brain-to-vehicle" technology at next week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The "B2V" system requires a driver to wear a skullcap that measures brain-wave activity and transmits its readings to steering, acceleration and braking systems that can start responding even before the driver initiates the action. The driver still turns the wheel and hits the gas pedal, but the car anticipates those movements and begins the actions 0.2 seconds to 0.5 seconds sooner, said Lucian Gheorghe, a senior innovation researcher at Nissan overseeing the project.

Most automakers are figuring out how to take the "driver" out of driving, but Nissan is using tech to make it more fun. It's researching what it calls "brain-to-vehicle" (B2V) tech that can read your brainwaves and figure out what you're going to do next. After the driver puts on a skullcap device that can measure brain activity, an AI system can then predict if you're going to turn or brake, and initiate the action 0.2 to 0.5 seconds before you react. "When most people think about autonomous driving, they have a very impersonal vision of the future, where humans relinquish control to the machines," said Nissan VP Daniele Schillaci. "B2V technology does the opposite, by using signals from their own brain to make the drive even more exciting and enjoyable."