Could This New Nissan Driver Assist Feature Eliminate Middle Lane Hogging?

It’s one of the most frustrating things about modern driving: there you are, happily cruising along a motorway, when you encounter someone sitting in the middle lane at 67mph, with a completely empty lane to their left.

What are they doing? How do they think motorways work? If you were to look inside their brains, would there just be one of those toy cymbal-bashing monkeys? All questions we’ll never know the answer to, but Nissan is introducing a new piece of driver-assistance tech that might help make this behaviour a thing of the past.

Part of its new ProPilot 2.1 suite of driver-assist tech, the feature is so far only available in North America on the Nissan Rogue (that’s the X-Trail to us in Europe) and the Infiniti QX80 (that’s a pointlessly vast, ugly lump of an SUV to us in Europe), although it’s soon set to arrive on the QX80’s close relative, the Nissan Armada.

Essentially, when a driver completes a pass on a two-lane freeway, if they don’t move straight back over and the system recognises that it’s clear to do so, they’ll get a polite reminder suggesting it might be a good idea. If we’d coded it, it would involve a few more four-letter words, so maybe it’s good we didn’t.

There are a couple of caveats, besides the obvious one that it’s currently only available in a couple of models and markets. Namely, it’ll only work if Nissan’s ProPilot 2.1 highway driving assist is switched on, and it’s so far only compatible with certain stretches of highway.

We see no reason something independent couldn’t be implemented to work on pretty much any stretch of freeway, motorway, autobahn, autostrada, expressway, or whatever else you want to call it, though. All it would take would be using the array of sensors that modern cars already have to check that there’s no slow-moving traffic in the lane to their left or right (depending on the driving side of the country in question), and a dashboard notification telling the driver to get the f*** back across.

Generally, it’s our opinion that most of the suite of advanced driver assistance programmes that modern cars have to have – lane keep assist, speed limit warnings, and so on – are irritating, badly implemented and counterintuitive messes that only serve to make the driver more distracted. Something that could eliminate the scourge of middle lane hogging, though, is something we’re fully onboard with – especially if it’s coming from the maker of two of the biggest offenders, the Juke and Qashqai. Clearly, Nissan knows its audience.

Motorway image: Mat Fascione, CC BY-SA 2.0