Every car manufacturer, it seems, is building a self-driving car, these days. At CES 2015, we've seen both Audi and Mercedes show their achievements in the field. Now, Nissan and NASA have teamed up, and joined the race.

The U.S. agency and Japanese automaker announced a five-year partnership on Thursday, introducing plans to build an autonomous vehicle system and preparations to apply the technology commercially.

Although NASA and Nissan may seem like an odd couple, they have quite a bit in common when it comes to car tech. Nissan has been improving its electric car, the Leaf, for four years now, while NASA has an electric, automated vehicle of sorts: the Mars rover.

Scientists with the Nissan Research Center in Silicon Valley and NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California will design a zero-emission, autonomous vehicle, with plans to test drive the first one at Ames in 2015.

“The partnership will accelerate Nissan’s development of safe, secure and reliable autonomous drive technology that we will progressively introduce to consumers beginning in 2016 up to 2020,” Carlos Ghosn, president and CEO of Nissan Motor Co., said in a press release.

Nissan previously showed off its autonomous-driving tech at the 2013 CEATEC Innovation Awards, including cars that can detect road conditions and automatically steer, brake and accelerate as needed. The company said it believes that by the year 2020, we'll have autonomous vehicles that can navigate in "nearly all situations," including city driving.

BONUS: I rode in a driverless car on the streets of Vegas