Most 2018 Nissans to Come With Automated Braking Standard

Unless it’s a NISMO model or has a stick.

byEric Brandt|
Most 2018 Nissans to Come With Automated Braking Standard
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Nissan is planning on giving most of its 2018 models automatic emergency braking as standard equipment in the United States. To put that in context, that's over 1 million cars—or two-thirds of all Nissan light-duty vehicles in the US. That’s more than double the amount of 2017 Nissan models equipped with this semi-autonomous safety tech.

This is an effort to get ahead of the game in terms of new safety regulation. The NHTSA struck a deal with 20 automakers last year to standardize autonomous emergency braking by 2022.

Specifically, this tech will be standard on 2018 models of the Altima, Maxima, Murano, Pathfinder, Rogue, Rogue Sport, Leaf, and Sentra. That’s everything but the Versa, Armada, Juke, 370Z, GT-R, trucks, and vans. If it’s a NISMO model or if it has a manual transmission, it won’t come standard with autonomous braking. (Nissan must assume if you drive a NISMO or you drive stick, you already know how to drive.)

Nissan

As far as when those other vehicles will get this safety tech as standard, it depends on how the initial rollout goes in their high-volume cars and crossovers. “We’re not stopping with [this list],” Nissan North America vice president of product planning Michael Bunce told Automotive News. “We will continue to roll it out until we have it on 100 percent of our models.”

Nissan is confident that this will help grow market acceptance of the technology, which detects a stopped car or another obstacle in front of the car and slams on the brakes without driver involvement.

“The technology is becoming more accepted in the market,” said Bunce. "We've begun to see in our market research that this system is resonating with consumers. Once they have it and experience it activating just one time, they can't live without it."

No word yet on what this means for base prices.

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