In a news release this week, Carlos Ghosn, chief executive of Nissan, said that the Japanese automobile manufacturer hopes to be selling their first commercially viable autonomous vehicle by 2020. The automaker said that the technology will be offered in several different models and will be realistically priced for most consumers.

For several years, Nissan and Infiniti have been leaders in driver assisted systems that maintain safe distances from other vehicles and keep drivers in their lanes. These systems have helped feed the development of autonomous driving by using 360-degree cameras, radar, and laser systems that are already available on many Nissan products.

Nissan recently began working with research and educational institutions to make autonomous vehicles a reality. These schools include MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon, Oxford, the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Virginia Tech, and nearly every major university in Japan. According to Nissan, the next step is tying all these technologies together and to begin testing. The company hopes to have a dedicated autonomous vehicle testing facility completed next year in Japan,