Nissan beats Tesla to the punch: First full self-driving car tested on public roads in Japan as Tesla awaits autonomous driving service debut

For the first time ever in Japan, Nissan has successfully tested a fully autonomous, driverless vehicle on public roads, beating electric car giant Tesla to the feat in the process.

The route took place in Yokohama, a large city south of Tokyo, and the car in question was a heavily modified version of the Nissan Serena, Japan’s top-selling minivan.

It carried an additional 14 cameras, nine radars and six Lidar sensors over the standard model, which were used in conjunction to detect and measure the speed and distance of road users and stationary objects, as well as traffic lights.

Nissan said the use of AI technology “significantly enhanced recognition, behavioural prediction and judgment as well as control”, while the car's 1825mm height allowed for more accurate detection of the car’s surroundings.

The vehicle was monitored remotely by Nissan staff, while a remote driver could take control of the vehicle if issues arose.

It comes as the brand looks to increase its service demonstrations of autonomous driving (AD) to 20 vehicles between the fiscal years of 2025 and 2026, with all demonstrations set to take place in Yokohama – a strategic hub for the Nissan brand.

Nissan is often bypassed as a pioneer of self-driving cars for more publicised brands such as Tesla, though the brand, which launched the world’s first mass-market EV, has made significant strides in AD since at least the 1990s.

Under its Zero Fatality campaign, Nissan was an early developer of camera imaging processing and Lidar radar technologies, both of which are crucial technologies for AD.

In the US, where self-driving regulations vary state-by-state, Nissan’s fully-supervised ProPilot 2.0 system offers hands-off capability in single lane highway driving. It can also assist the driver with lane changes, parking and gear shifting.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced at the brand's Q1 earning's call in January that it plans on launching its own unsupervised, full-self driving service of its cars for public use in Austin, Texas in June after revealing large-scale testing was being undertaken at its production facilities.

Footage released by Tesla shows outgoing generations of the Model Y driving themselves off the assembly line to their positions at the factory’s loading dock at the brand’s Freemont facility in California – an approximate distance of 1.9km.

Despite offering supervised FSD technology as a paid service in the US, however, Tesla has not tested any driverless cars on US public roads without driver supervision.