New self-driving test ride video! We experience Nissan’s world-leading automated driving on winding English country roads at 50+mph
It’s all very well self-driving on the wide sun-drenched boulevards of California, but can they do it on the twisty, unmarked, pothole-ridden lanes of Bedford? Nissan can.
Having covered the exciting UK development of Nissan’s automated driving (AD) technology over many years, from HumanDrive and ServCity, to the most recent evolvAD project, we finally got to experience it for ourselves… and it was amazing – a real-world demonstration of some seriously impressive self-driving capabilities. Check out this in-car video:
Held on 2 September 2025, the day before the main Cenex Expo event, the invite-only Cenex-Nissan evolvAD Showcase took place at the Nissan Technical Centre Europe (NTCE) facility at Cranfield in Bedfordshire.
Following a brief intro by Cenex CEO, Robert Evans, evolvAD project manager, Robert (Bob) Bateman, explained the key challenges and technologies involved, before joining a panel featuring project partners Tom Levermore, of Connected Places Catapult, and Luigi Bisbiglia, of SBD Automotive.
We’ll delve deeper into the cutting-edge grip limit tech another time – the headline being that it is brilliant but currently quite expensive – but soon we were invited outside to enjoy a tour of the lovely local public roads – a route dubbed the “hachi-noji”, meaning figure of eight in Japanese.
We had a highly qualified safety driver behind the wheel if needed, and a Nissan trail car behind us to guard against rear-end shunts – completely understandable given the value of the computer kit in the boot, which we weren’t allowed to take pictures of!
Self-driving ride
Capsule review: It was mighty impressive, competent and effective. The car can actually go much faster, but the power has been dialled back to make the ride safer, more comfortable than exhilarating.
As someone used to sitting in the driver’s seat, being a passenger is something of a rarity in itself. Because the route is HD mapped to the nearest millimetre, the car knows exactly where the edge of the road is, and it uses every inch, whereas human drivers tend to drift towards the centre.
I was looking forward to it carrying speed into some S-bends, but a car came the other way, initially taking the middle of the road, so the Nissan wisely backed off. Safety first. All in all, excellent – a new personal benchmark for best self-driving experience to date.
Supported by CCAV, Innovate UK, Zenzic and TRL, the £3.5m evolveAD project has now been extended to develop, in Bateman’s words, “A 360-degree understanding of the infrastructure and regulatory needs, providing critical insights to policymakers and urban planners to ensure a successful introduction of AD mobility services in the right way and at the right time.”
And why did Nissan choose the UK for self-driving testing? If its tech can cope with the many varied challenges of the UK road network – speedhumps, mini-roundabouts, 60mph single carriageway lanes and all – it will be more than ready for Europe, and then the rest of the world.
