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It’s not exactly autonomous, but it works. Nissan believes the fastest way to get driverless cars on the road is to give them remote human support – and it’s using NASA technology to do it.

Nissan demonstrated its Seamless Autonomous Mobility (SAM) platform at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas last week, which incorporates a degree of teleoperation into the autonomous car system. Although vehicles will be able to drive themselves most of the time, human “mobility managers” can remotely take control in unexpected situations.

“Autonomy systems are not simple, it is a very hard problem,” says , director of Nissan’s Research Center in Sunnyvale, California. “You need to make sure you can handle all situations, all the time, every time, before you can say your system is fully autonomous.”

A live broadcast from the company’s Silicon Valley facility more than 800 kilometres away from Las Vegas showed a self-driving vehicle encountering a construction obstacle.

The car stopped, put on its hazard lights and sent an assistance request via an LTE wireless connection to a mobility manager on stage at the show. After receiving the notification, the manager pulled up a satellite feed and drew a route around the obstacle on his desktop computer. Following the relayed instructions, the car took the designated path around the construction and resumed its course.

The incident took 90 seconds to resolve, but the results were also transmitted to a second autonomous vehicle close behind. Coming across the same obstacle and receiving the same instructions, the second car was delayed by only 12 seconds.

Nissan is developing the system with NASA, which uses a similar hybrid troubleshooting process with its Mars rovers.

“We tell the rover to go explore a rock, take a sample from it and send us back the results,” says , director of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. “If it runs into a situation it’s not familiar with, it goes into safe mode and waits for further instructions or commands.”

Automotive analyst Mark Boyadjis at research firm IHS Markit is impressed by Nissan’s system. “Making a car drive itself has been done, now it’s about trying to make it work on a mass scale,” he says.