Nissan’s IMx electric concept car wants to get to know you

Nissan’s latest electric vehicle concept aims for crossover appeal, with a design that goes well beyond the Nissan Leaf in terms of aggressive styling and visual appeal. The IMx also focuses on self-driving technologies, and on learning a user’s preferences and providing them with a wraparound informatics display that incorporates its learnings about its user.

The IMx design has been conceived to communicate its electric underpinnings on the outside, and it’s a look that was conceived based on taking inspiration from Japanese swords, and also from ‘washi,’ or Japanese paper that’s made for subtly and durability with a painstaking multi-step creation process.

It’s definitely an attractive car, with a full glass roof and sleek narrow headlights, and an interior with wood trim that lend to the sense of open interior space made possible by the extra room made available through use of the electric drivetrain. The suicide doors and lack of a B pillar further add to that sense of expansive, usable space.

The Nissan IMx also has a range of smart features on board, including the ability to engage Nissan’s self-driving ProPILOT system, which takes over driving duties. This includes some neat additional features like a retracting steering wheel and brake and gas pedal, which descend into the dashboard and the floor respectively to provide more room for the driver to relax comfortably.

Nissan’s latest concept car also features a wraparound display that provides live information around the driver and passengers in the cockpit, just below the windshield and passenger windows. The screen will provide info like navigation data, as well as suggestions about what they might like to do, extrapolating that information based on past trip data.

Nissan told me that it’s working with partners on its in-vehicle smart assistant, but it wouldn’t articulate which partners it’s using specifically. It also hinted that the assistant might be able to follow the driver beyond the vehicle throughout their daily life.

The car’s interface use cameras placed throughout the vehicle and artificial intelligence to interpret user commands and anticipate their needs, with the intend of minimizing manual controls and other potential distractions.

Nissan says that while this is just a concept, it’s still intended to reflect the actual direction of their efforts around ‘Intelligent Mobility’ and its productization.