Despite the best efforts of automakers like Tesla the public still isn’t all that trustworthy of self-driving cars. Nissan engineers came up with a fun little way to warm people up to the idea, and it took real balls to do it.
Golf balls, that is. Nissan’s crew took the technology that powers their vehicles’ driver assist features and used them to create the ProPilot ball. It’s guaranteed to find the hole on the first putt, every time.
It doesn’t matter how bad your aim is. It doesn’t even matter if you bother to aim at all. It also doesn’t matter if you don’t hit the ball hard enough or if you hit it too hard. Nissan’s system, based on their updated ProPilot 2.0 tech, will automatically make all the course corrections needed to put the ball in the hole.
The ball itself is a bit like a souped-up Sphero. A camera with a clear overhead view keeps tabs on the position of the ball and the cup. The brains behind the system is an AI that processes information from the camera and then passes navigational instructions on to the ball.
Clearly a golf ball that finds its own way home isn’t going to change opinions about self-driving cars overnight… but it’ll put a few smiles on faces and give people something to talk about around the water cooler.
On the sporting front, I’m thinking PGA tour golfer Bryson DeChambeau may want to get in touch with Nissan. Cutting the time he spends sizing up a putt from two minutes to a few seconds ought to get the other tour pros off his back about his glacial pace on the greens. ProPilot balls may not be tour-approved but maybe they’ll be willing to make an exception this time.
As for the rest of us non-card-holding golfers, with Nissan’s ProPilot balls in your bag we’ll never find ourselves doing this on the course again:
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