Nissan, currently the sixth best-selling automotive brand in America, has chosen to focus its energies on usable and accessible alternative-fuel vehicles?such as the world?s top-selling electric car, the Leaf?while also creating evanescent fantasies related to the eventuality of fully autonomous driving. It is into this latter category that its newest experiment fits. Unveiled this month at the CES technology show in Las Vegas, it is called brain-to-vehicle (B2V) technology. Quite simply, it is meant to harvest a driver?s thoughts.
Why would someone want their brain waves collected by their car" To provide the vehicle?s driving-assistance sensors with advance information. All you have to do is wear what looks like a kid’s wrestling helmet studded with electrodes, as if you were going into a futuristic clinic to have those voices in your head diagnosed. Simple, right" ?The concept is to decode, in real time, brain activity. Not in terms of reading commands and so on; just brain activity while you are driving the vehicle,? Lucian Gheorghe, who directs the project at Nissan?s advanced research center in Japan, told C/D. ?To use this connected with autonomous driving functions in two ways: to enhance performance when you?re driving and to enhance the riding experience when riding [using autonomous-driving technology].”

You probably shouldn?t think too many things too quickly?at least not yet. This technology is in the early phases of an iterative proc...