Tackling Tokyo in a self-driving car We take a ride in a self-driving Nissan Ariya to find out if an autonomous car can cope with the traffic and huge volume of pedestrians in one of the world’s busiest cities... Think of Tokyo and you’re likely to conjure up images of clogged multi-lane roads and 10s of thousands of pedestrians. After all, it is one of the world’s most densely populated cities, with 38 million inhabitants. While car ownership is relatively low compared to the population, around 30 million people commute on public transport every day. So the thought of letting a self-driving car loose on these busy streets is daunting to say the least. If it’s too assertive, it could accidentally cause carnage, and if it’s too cautious, it could simply be sat at one road crossing all day. However, the brave and innovative engineers at Nissan have spent the last two years creating a vehicle that they say copes admirably with this city’s traffic and pedestrians. That’s why I found myself sitting in the back seat of a heavily modified Nissan Ariya, with executive chief engineer, Tetsuya Iijima, in the driver’s seat. He wasn’t driving, but, like here in the UK, it’s a legal requirement in Japan to have a person in the driver’s seat ready to take over the controls of an autonomous vehicle if necessary in an emergency. We were about to embark on a five-mile, 40-minute drive through the city. Our start and end point was the Tokyo Prince Hotel, near Shiba Park, and the car’s first hurdle was to join the dual carriageway at the front of the hotel. It did this with ease, gently gliding out onto the main road when the traffic on the main road was halted by nearby traffic lights. The