A new partnership between NASA and Nissan could bring the dream of a self-driving automotbiles on Mars closer to reality, removing the need for small and slow rovers.  

The Nissan Leaf appears to be the testing model, which will be used in prototyping and testing bays in the U.S., alongside Google's own self-driving program.

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NASA Ames Research Center will be the site of the automation testing. Nissan will work on zero-emission vehicles capable of recharging on other planets, which may mean new innovations in solar power charging and battery technologies.

Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn says NASA is a great organization for creating intelligent and reliable human-machine interface, a needed commodity in the self-driving world. NASA, meanwhile, wants to utilize Nissan's two years of work on self-driving vehicles in Japan to really understand how it will bring the vehicles to Mars, and potentially other planets.

Even though Nissan did not attend CES 2015 like many of the other European and U.S. automotive companies, it has been working on self-driving technologies for longer than all of them, rivaled only by Google.

If the company is able to show real progress, NASA might take them on the mission to Mars, rather than incorporating Google's technology onto another car manufacturer. 

TagsNASA, nissan, Self-Driving Car, space rovers, Mars