Nissan Safety Shield 360 suite to be standard on 10 models in the US

KUALA LUMPUR: A few months back, Nissan announced its four-year plan aiming to “achieve sustainable growth, financial stability and profitability” by the end of the fiscal year 2023. For this, the Japanese automaker is cutting production costs and also preparing to launch 12 new cars in the next 18 months with a special focus on electric vehicles. All along with these efforts, the company is also trying to make its cars more secure. Recently, it announced the Safety Shield 360 active safety technologies to be standard on ten of its most renowned models, from 2021 onwards.

Nissan Safety Shield 360 is a bundle of six active safety technologies that provide 360 degrees of active driver assistance, pedestrian detection, and crash avoidance. These include:

• Automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection: It tracks vehicles and pedestrians with the help of forward-facing radar and camera and gives warning to the driver. It also applies brakes to avoid the severity of frontal collisions when needed.
• High beam assist: It detects a vehicle ahead and automatically switches the headlights to low beam, and turns the high beam back when appropriate.

• Lane departure warning: It provides a visual warning and audible signals to the driver drifting from the lane.
• Blind-spot warning: It helps the driver to spot vehicles in blind areas.
• Rear cross-traffic alert: It detects approaching vehicles when reversing out of the parking area and warns the driver.
• Rear automatic braking: It detects stationary objects when backing up and applies the brakes when necessary.

Currently, Nissan offers this safety suite as standard equipment on six models, which include the Leaf, Sentra, Maxima, Kicks, Rogue Sport, and Titan. Adding to this list is the new 2021 Rogue. And, if we talk about the rest of the three cars, the automaker is keeping this undisclosed for now. The upcoming Nissan Frontier and the all-new Z car are most likely to be on the cards.

“Offering these safety technologies as standard equipment on 10 of our most popular models is an important step forward,” said Andy Christensen, senior manager and lead technology expert of Intelligent Transportation System Research, Nissan Technical Center North America. “This added layer of protection can help keep young drivers safe especially as they are getting used to being on busy roads.”

Nissan’s safety shield is almost identical to the Toyota Safety Sense and Honda Sensing Suite packages, which are available as standard equipment on many Toyota and Honda models.

Also read: 2021 Nissan Navara facelift coming soon, here's what we know