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Nissan-Renault and game developer plan driverless ride-hailing

TOKYO - The Nissan and Renault alliance plans to launch driverless ride-hailing and ride-sharing services in coming years, as the automakers look beyond making and selling cars to survive an industry being quickly transformed by new services. Automakers are leveraging expertise in automated driving functions for mass-market cars to develop mobility services, as they compete with tech firms such as Alphabet Inc and Uber in the fast-growing "pay-per-ride" market which threatens to hit demand for car ownership. Ogi Redzic, head of Nissan-Renault's Connected Vehicles and Mobility Services division, said the alliance would begin self-driving services based on its electric cars "certainly within 10 years," though not likely before 2020. "We think that the big opportunity for us is in automation, electric vehicles and ride-sharing and hailing together," Redzic said in an interview on Thursday. Nissan and Renault join a small group of automakers aiming to enter the ride-hailing market, which Goldman Sachs last month estimated would grow eightfold by 2030 to be five times the size of the taxi market. Redzic said the Japanese and French partners were testing self-driving vehicles, and that any service would run on pre-mapped courses with predetermined pick-up and drop-off points. The two automakers are developing the system with Japanese game software maker DeNA Co Ltd and French public transport operator Transdev SA. German rival BMW AG is also testing autonomous vehicles for use in ride-hailing services, while Uber has been developing self-driving technology. U.S. tech firm nuTonomy Inc and ride services company Lyft Inc, which counts General Motors Co as a major shareholder, this month announced they would begin piloting an autonomous vehicle ride-hailing service in Boston. Redzic said to market a self-driving service, regulations need to change to allow driverless cars on roads. At the moment, most global jurisdictions do not expressly authorise vehicles to operate on regular roads without a driver. "It doesn't just depend on us," he said. "To become fully driverless you need laws to change." Reporting by Naomi TajitsuRelated Video:

Nissan teases New York-bound 2015 Murano

It was over a month ago when we received reports that Nissan would be unveiling the new Murano at the New York Auto Show next month. Now the Japanese automaker has confirmed its imminent arrival, offering up the brief teaser clip below to give us a very faint idea of what to expect.
In announcing the Murano's upcoming debut in Manhattan, the company described the Murano as "the halo vehicle for Nissan's expanding range of bold crossovers and SUVs," previewing the design that will distinguish a whole range of Nissans to follow.
Short of that, we've got little to go on, but we're expecting to see some traits from the Resonance concept of 2013 Detroit vintage finding their way onto the production version of a vehicle that has always been rather stylized from the start. Something (sales figures, perhaps?) tells us that the oddball CrossCabriolet will get lost along the way, not that we'll mind.

Nissan to give Qashqai the Nismo treatment

Nismo is on a bit of a rampage lately. Once consigned to the fringes, Nissan has taken its performance sub-brand into the mainstream and let it loose on a whole mess of its products. The Juke Nismo was followed by a 370Z Nismo, and in Los Angeles, we saw the GT-R Nismo, Sentra Nismo concept and Juke Nismo RS.
So what's next from Nismo? According to the latest intel from across the pond, Nissan is working on a tuned version of its new Qashqai. Car magazine is reporting that the larger crossover will get the same 1.6-liter turbo four as the Juke Nismo, but with the RS model's 212-horsepower out and not the "base" model's 197. Expect all the other bells and whistles applied to transform a Nissan model into a Nismo one to apply as well.
If the Qashqai name doesn't ring any proverbial bells for you, that's alright, because it's only sold overseas, where it's one of Nissan's most popular models. The crossover (which looks like the new Rogue but is a substantially different model) was recently completely replaced, with engine options ranging up to 150 horsepower - so the jump to over 200 should make for quite a different beast altogether. Whether a parallel or subsequent program to give the Rogue a similar treatment is another matter, but given the pace at which Nismo seems to be running, that may only be a matter of time.