Nissan Wants to Save Wildlife with Animalert

Nissan doesn’t get much credit as an innovator in the electric vehicle (EV) market, but the Leaf was among the first mainstream, modern battery-powered vehicles on road when it first launched. As a result, the brand was among the first to face a new problem EVs posed: their silent propulsion systems meant they could sneak up on pedestrians.

The automaker therefore developed a sound that its EVs could make at low speeds to warn humans — a technology that is now mandatory in many jurisdictions. And that got the company’s engineers thinking: If a simple sound could help protect people, what else could it protect?

The answer, for now, is the Amami black rabbit, an adorable species only lives on the Amami Oshima and Tokunoshima Islands. Sometimes described as a living fossil, the short-eared animal is a living remnant of the ancient rabbits that once lived on the Asian mainland.

Tragically, the animal is designated as an endangered species, and its numbers are in decline, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The main threats to the animal are human intrusion and disturbance, invasive species, and, most relevantly for our purposes, transportation. Instances of roadkill have increased every year for the last seven years and, in 2023, a record-breaking 147 Amami black rabbits were killed by cars and trucks. 

The island the rabbit lives on is already a World Natural Heritage site and the animal is considered a special natural monument of Japan — meaning that hunters have been barred from targeting the animal since at least 1921. Clearly, something else needs to be done, and Nissan thinks it could contribute to conservation efforts.

Working together with seven other organizations, including the Okayama University of Science and Amami City, Nissan has started testing an auditory warning system for vehicles that would scare the rabbit away when a car is approaching.

Essentially a speaker that blasts an unpleasant sound long enough for the animal to hear it (but not long enough to harm it), a test vehicle equipped with the system has already encountered around 100 rabbits and seems to be working, a researcher told Fast Company.

There’s still a lot of work to be done to validate that the alert system will help save Amami black rabbits’ lives in real-world conditions (so far, the tests have only been run at low speeds), but the early results are promising. Better yet, it also seems to work on other animals, though the focus is on this one species for now.

Ultimately, though, Nissan says it would like Animalert to help save as many animals as possible. As many as 120,000 animals per year are killed on Japanese roads alone. Saving these animals is a moral imperative in and of itself, but accomplishing it would also help save drivers’ lives and prevent damage to their vehicles, and save the earth’s resources as a result.

Admittedly, Nissan is trying to solve a big problem — one it helped create, and which other automakers will have to help stop — and while other solutions like wildlife crossings will also have to be implemented, Animalert is at least a step in the right direction.