The Renault-Nissan Alliance is entering the race to build autonomous cars with a plan to introduce 10 models capable of temporarily relieving humans of their driving duties on highways and city streets.

The road map laid out Thursday calls for Renault-Nissan to gradually phase in the self-driving vehicles in the U.S., Europe, Japan and China as its engineers fine-tune the automated technology and its management wrangles with regulators over safety concerns.

If things pan out the way Renault-Nissan envisions, its first batch of self-driving cars debuting later this year will able steer while traveling down a single lane on the highway. By 2018, the cars will be able to automatically navigate across several highway lanes, and then will be able to handle traversing city streets on their own by 2020.

(AP)