Nissan Qashqai 2014 claimed as “world’s most parkable car”
Technology from Nissan's self-driving vehicle programme makes its way to consumer level with an automatic parking system
Nissan has officially unveiled the all-new Qashqai 2014, which it claims is “the world’s most parkable car” thanks to an advanced active parking system.
Part of the company’s positioning of the Qashqai as an urban car, the Nissan Park Assist system is an add-on for the company’s Around View Monitor. When activated, the Park Assist system automatically measures the size of an available parallel parking space, then actively steers the vehicle into the slot with the driver operating only the forward and reverse motion of the car.
The result, Nissan claims, is the ability to enter a parking space just 80cm longer than the Qashqai itself without needing to touch the wheel. The system also works with bay-type parking, using the ‘helicopter view’ mode of the Around View Monitor to detect the white lines of parking bays and again automatically steer the vehicle into the slot.
Park Assist is one of the early successes of the company’s work to produce a fully autonomous vehicle, tests of which were recently carried out on Japan’s public highways as part of a roadmap that will see the company launch its first self-driving vehicle in 2020. Other technologies from the programme that have reached the Qashqai include forward emergency braking, driver attention alert, traffic sign recognition, lane departure warning, blind spot warning, moving object detection and high-beam assist – collectively known as the Nissan Safety Shield system.
The Nissan Qashqai 2014 model year range has been confirmed as starting at £17,595 on the road for the entry-level Visia trim and rising to £27,845 Tekna trim with all available options – representing a not-inconsiderable price increase over their outgoing equivalents.