control your Nissan Leaf with your iPad

A new system that allow the drive to hand over the controls of the car to a computer has been successfully trialled by Oxford University.

Tested on a Nissan LEAF electric car, the new Auto Drive system uses low cost saRather than take over the car completely, the system is designed to take over familiar, routine journeys to relieve the driver of the tedium of daily commutes.

Using an ordinary iPad on the dashboard, the Auto Drive system flashes a prompt to the driver, offering him or her the option of switching to auto drive for a familiar part of the journey. Any tap of the brake pedal restores the car’s controls to the driver.

“We are working on a low-cost ‘auto drive’ navigation system, that doesn’t depend on GPS, done with discreet sensors that are getting cheaper all the time. It’s easy to imagine that this kind of technology could be in a car you could buy,” said Professor Paul Newman of Oxford University’s Department of Engineering Science, who is leading the research alongside Oxford’s Dr Ingmar Posner.t nav technology, coupled with cameras and lasers to recognise the road its travelling along.