The fund prioritizes investment in emerging companies
Nissan presents a technology based on brain waves
Renault, Nissan and Mitsubishi announced yesterday the creation of a joint venture capital fund through which they plan to invest more than 1,000 million dollars (840 million euros) in new technologies during the next five years.

The new fund, Alliance Ventures, will prioritize investment in emerging companies and projects focused on new generation mobility, “including the electrification of vehicles, autonomous driving systems, connectivity technologies and artificial intelligence.”

The president and CEO of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi, Carlos Ghosn, said yesterday in the framework of the CES Technology Fair, which is being held until January 12 in Las Vegas, that “this initiative is designed to attract companies emerging from the world’s most promising automotive technologies, “which will be able to” benefit from the scale of the Alliance, “which sold more than 10 million vehicles in 2017.

Ghosn assumed, in a later interview with Bloomberg, that motor vehicles have a problem around these developments. “It is not enough to expand our departments and organizations. I think we can not cover this issue alone, “he said.

This year alone, the fund plans to invest 200 million dollars (167.5 million euros) in this type of project, some investments that they hope to diversify into “the largest corporate venture capital fund in the automotive industry” in the period until 2022, until his Alliance is extended. The fund’s first agreement will be a strategic investment in the US company for the creation of materials for cobalt-free batteries Ionic Materials, they detailed.

Alliance Ventures will be led by François Dossa, who until the creation of the fund served as president of Nissan Brazil, and is planned to be based in Silicon Valley (United States), Paris, Yokohama (Japan) and Beijing.
The partners plan to launch 12 exclusively electric models within the framework of their alliance in the next five years and expect to commercialize 40 models with autonomous driving technology and other types of intelligent vehicles, they detailed. This fund is added to the more than 8,500 million euros that the three companies dedicate to research and development each year.

Brain technology
For its part, Nissan will show at CES 2018 the pioneering technology of Nissan Brain-to-Vehicle (B2V), which interprets the signals of the driver’s brain to assist in driving and to help autonomous and manual vehicle systems to learn of the driver.
According to a Nissan source consulted by the specialist magazine The Verge, this technology, which could be implemented “within 5 or 10 years”, is possible because each activity gives the brain specific patterns, which can be measured thanks to a electroencephalogram. It aims to “accelerate reaction times and allow cars to adapt to the driver for a more pleasant ride,” says the Japanese company.

FIVE DAYS – Madrid – 11 JAN 2018 (Translation Soft)