Around View Monitor with Parking Guide

* First hybrid car * Safety systems on trial * We test new tech...

Around View Monitor with Parking Guide

With manufacturers such as Volkwagen already offering technology that will parallel park a car for you, including doing the steering, Nissan's guidance system, which merely superimposes your intended direction of travel on top of a picture, initially sounds very basic.

In fact, it is intuitive and effective.

Using four 180 degree cameras to create a birds-eye view from above the car, the system shows your whereabouts on a screen. Pull up beside a parking space, and you use a keypad to move a cursor the size of your car into the gap you wish to get into.

From there, you simply follow the instructions on the screen, pulling forward until it tells you to stop, aligning the steering wheel with the superimposed lines on the screen and accelerating and braking when told to do so.

On the test, the space was roughly 20% larger than the car itself, and the car was guided into the space despite the proximity to one of the parked cars setting off the parking sensors.

Although no official on-sale date was released, the system is expected to be available from next year.