Kelly Nissan of Beverly News

From Car Advice’s Alborz Fallah - Nissan and Infiniti engineers are hard at work developing a range of sophisticated active safety technologies to take the lead in the constantly changing world of automotive safety.

Pioneering automobile safety technology is no easy task, with the likes of Volvo and Mercedes-Benz leading the charge, but Nissan (and particularly Infiniti) is determined to join them at the top of the game.

Prior to the Tokyo Motor Show, CarAdvice spent a day at Nissan’s GranDrive testing facility to experience the latest in Japanese active safety.

It’s important to know why pioneering vehicle safety is important, because most of the features we experienced are a long way from being made mandatory by governments around the world. This means the huge amounts of money being poured into researching and developing vehicle safety technology by key vehicle manufacturers is done so primarily for the benefit of its customers. (There’s no denying that it helps sell cars, but technology is getting so advanced that most buyers wouldn’t have a clue what safety features are hiding beneath the skin.)

Nissan’s ‘Vision2015′ is the company’s goal to halve the number of fatal or serious injuries that occur in its vehicles compared with 1995. In Japan and Europe this figure has already been achieved, so the ultimate goal has changed to reducing the number to zero. In order to do that, it’s not enough to just design more rigid and structurally safer cars with an ever-increasing number of airbags. The best way to eliminate injury or death is to prevent an accident in the first place.

Some of the active safety technologies that we’ve become familiar with in European cars will be introduced to the Nissan and Infiniti ranges in the near future:

Lane departure warning and prevention – using a rear-mounted camera, the vehicle can detect when it’s leaving its lane without indicating. It will audibly and visually warn the driver and help pull the vehicle back in to its line. This is helpful if the driver is distracted and the vehicle leaves its lane unexpectedly.

Distance control assist – helps keep a safe distance from the vehicle in front, great for smart cruise control that can flow with traffic without driver input.

Forward collision warning – similar to Volvo’s City Safety, the system can detect a potential collision and give early warnings to increase the likelihood of preventing an accident altogether.

Blind spot warning and intervention – using the same rear camera as lane departure warning, the system can detect a vehicle in its blind spot and provide a visual warning at first and intervene to prevent you merging into another vehicle.

Around view monitor (bird’s eye view) – giving the driver a clear bird’s eye view of what’s around the car, great for parking or reversing out of the garage.

Moving object detection – pedestrian and vehicle detection technology.

Despite our familiarity with the above, there were two technologies that we were genuinely and positively surprised with. The first of which was Acceleration Suppression for Pedal Misapplication (ASPM), which is another way of saying accidentally stepping on the accelerator instead of the brake pedal. This is a common issue in car parks worldwide and accounts for 10,000 injuries or fatalities per year in Japan alone.

To demonstrate, we were put behind the wheel of an Infiniti vehicle positioned about five or so metres away from a wall. The instructions were to flatten the accelerator, heading directly for the wall – not something we’re accustomed to doing but we put our faith in technology and stepped on it. Thankfully the technology kicked in and our command was ignored.

The car’s onboard computers can work out the difference between a mistaken or legitimate application of the accelerator pedal. So if you’re a few metres away from a wall, a car or a person and all of a sudden you panic and go for the accelerator instead of the brake, it will ignore your command. Better still, even if you happen to roll towards the object anyway, it will apply the brake.

Pedal misapplication happens a lot more frequently than you’d think, so it’s definitely going to be one of the technologies on the wish list.

The other noteworthy technology was Predictive Forward Collision Warning (PFCW), which uses radar to detect a reduction in speed of the vehicle that is two cars ahead. It sounds strange, but it’s true and it works.

Read the rest of this mind-blowing article after the jump.

If you liked this article, check out what Volkswagen has in store for the future – much like Nissan – here.

From Inautonews - Nissan aims to reach 10 percent market share in the United States over the next three years by focusing on larger volumes of fewer models, CEO Carlos Ghosn announced.

According to Ghosn, “the most important element is having enough cars with big volumes, not multiplying the number of products that we have.”

“We need a limited number of cars with very big volumes to sustain the brand,” Ghosn told Automotive News last week. Ghosn also said the Nissan lineup needs readjusting, as a lot of cars with small volumes doesn’t work”. “I want cars with big volumes,” he added.

In October, the only Nissan product reaching the top 10 for vehicle sales by nameplate in the U.S. was the Altima, while 19 of the 23 Nissan and Infiniti models had sales below 50,000 units. Nissan aims to achieve a 10 percent share in the U.S. market, estimated to reach 14 million units by mid-2012.

In order to meet the ambitious goal, Nissan needs to sell 54 percent more cars in the U.S. than last year’s 908,570 units sold under its own brand and the luxury brand Infiniti. Over the last two years, Nissan increased its market share from 6.6 percent in 2009 to 7.4 percent in 2010. During the first 10 months of 2011, Nissan’s sales increased by 15 percent, to 856,425 units, placing the Japanese manufacturer in the fourth place among automakers with the highest percentage increase.