Using a sensor hidden in the grille, the Nissan Rogue Sport is one of several models that will make automatic emergency braking standard for 2018.
To distinguish itself in the increasingly competitive field of advanced safety capabilities, Nissan will standardize automatic emergency braking in the bulk of its 2018 model year lineup.
All the major manufacturers in the U.S. have some manner of forward crash mitigation technology available today and most have agreed to standardize it by 2022, but only a few have taken that step ahead of schedule. Nissan joins Toyota and Volvo as the only high-volume sellers to make automatic emergency braking, or AEB, available on the bulk of their sales fleets.
Using radar technology, the system monitors surrounding traffic and alerts drivers to potential crashes with audio and visual warnings. If the driver doesn’t respond, the system applies the brake autonomously.
Part of Nissan's "Safety Shield Technologies," automatic emergency braking uses a radar system to detect potential crashes.
Currently, AEB is part of a suite of driver assistance technologies that Nissan brands as its “Safety Shield.” It includes blind spot monitoring, lane departure prevention, alertness warnings, adaptive cruise control and an around view camera system.
Nissan will implement the standard automatic braking technology in its most popular cars and SUVs: the Rogue/Rogue Sport, Altima, Sentra, Pathfinder, Maxima, Murano and Leaf. The brand’s top-selling trucks, the Frontier and Titan, are not scheduled to get standard AEB and neither is the Versa subcompact sedan.
The Japanese automaker, which has its American headquarters in Tennessee, also won’t offer the technology with its manual transmission vehicles or its NISMO lineup, but it expects the total AEB sales to double to roughly 1 million vehicles.
The Nissan Altima also will receive automatic emergency braking as a standard feature for next year.
Russ Rader, a spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said AEB has been shown to reduce front-to-rear crash rates by 50 percent while collision warning systems curb accidents by about 27 percent. Both systems have been shown to reduce injury rates as well.
In a previous interview, Rader told the Daily News that among the latest intelligent safety systems that use radar and sensor systems to monitor traffic conditions and driving habits, AEB has proven to be the most effective system for improving safety followed by blind-spot warning.
The majority of Nissan's top sellers, including the Sentra, Altima, Maxima, Rogue, Murano and Pathfinder, will all receive AEB as a standard feature for 2018.
He compared the roll-out of these two features to electric stability control, which began as an available feature in luxury cars in the 1990s and is now standard throughout the industry.