- At its GM Forward event today, General Motors announced that it plans for Super Cruise to allow eyes-off driving in 2028.
- Currently, Super Cruise allows hands-off driving on over 750,000 miles of compatible highways in the United States and Canada. This update would be a step closer to much deeper autonomous driving assistance.
- Tesla’s Autopilot and Full Self-Driving require the driver to keep their eyes on the road. Only Mercedes-Benz offers a comparable system, but it’s much more limited.
Super Cruise has been an objective win for General Motors. The automated driving assistance system, which lets you take your hands off the wheel while you monitor the car and the road ahead, keeps picking up hundreds of thousands of subscribers when their trial periods end.
At its GM Forward event in New York on Wednesday, the carmaker had this to say to all those users: You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. And soon, seeing the road ahead may not even be a requirement.
Photo by: Patrick George
GM plans to add “eyes-free” functionality to Super Cruise by 2028, the company said, meaning that users will be able to take their hands off the wheel but will no longer be required to stay focused on the road when the system is engaged. This function will debut on the Cadillac Escalade IQ—and that means the current model, not a new one, a GM spokesperson confirmed. It would be a true Level 3 advanced driving assistance system, one step up from the Level 2 system that currently defines Super Cruise and virtually every other system in the U.S.
Photo by: General Motors
The Escalade IQ will do so with the addition of LIDAR, or light-based radar, making it a considerable technological leap from its current camera, radar and GPS-based system. That system will then spread to more GM models very quickly, CEO Mary Barra said at the event.
“We now have [standard Super Cruise] on 23 models, and we did that quite quickly, once we could,” Barra said, noting that its pace was slowed by the pandemic-related chip shortage. “This is something that you’ll see us roll up much, much faster than Super Cruise.”
Photo by: General Motors
GM officials have not disclosed which company is supplying its LIDAR array. Nor is it saying what this elevated level of Super Cruise might cost, or what the cost of a possible equipment package might be on the Escalade IQ. But over time, GM’s autonomous technology will move off of highways as well.
“From there, we’ll expand to urban environments, ultimately enabling your vehicle to handle errands while you focus on more important things,” said Sterling Anderson, GM’s chief product officer. “We’ll build incrementally, and we’ll deploy safely, because we know this works. That’s the only way this works.”
Moreover, GM’s senior vice president of software and services engineering, Dave Richardson, said it’s a big step toward the carmaker’s eventual goal of full autonomy. “This is what locks the path from today’s hands-free driving to tomorrow’s eyes-off driving, and ultimately to a future where the car drives itself,” he said.
When eyes-free driving is engaged on the Escalade IQ, turquoise lights will appear on the dashboard and the side mirrors. This allows for a visual cue to drivers and pedestrians outside the vehicle, GM said. They may also notice the Escalade IQ’s LIDAR sensor bump on the center of its roof.
Photo by: General Motors
GM officials said that its users have now driven more than 700 million miles across mapped highways with Super Cruise. But it will soon add “the technology and validation frameworks from Cruise,” its now-shuttered robotaxi service, to add 5 million more miles of experience to the system.
However, GM officials would not confirm if eyes-off Super Cruise will work on all of the same highways as the standard system does.
At present, engaging Super Cruise on GM’s range of vehicles triggers a green bar on the steering wheel to let you know it’s handling the highway driving. A camera and infrared LEDs are then used to track the driver’s head position and gaze, ensuring they’re not on their phone or reading a book or otherwise not ready to intervene. Other features include lane-centering, automatic lane changes and hands-free trailering.
Tesla’s camera-based Autopilot and Full Self-Driving systems pilot a car down the road, and they also require full driver attention. Tesla issues warnings or eventually disengages the system if they do not. If GM can implement this system at scale, it’ll be a leap over what Tesla’s doing—at least, what it’s doing in 2025.
Photo by: Patrick George
In making the announcement, GM seemingly took a shot at Tesla’s camera-only approach to ADAS.
“Unlike vision-only systems, GM’s approach is built on redundancy with LIDAR, radar, and cameras integrated into the vehicle’s design,” the automaker said. “At the core is sensor fusion: the LIDAR, radar, and cameras build the perception layer; real-world driving data trains the decision-making model; and high-fidelity simulation validates performance across rare or hazardous scenarios. This provides a safe, reliable, and highly capable eyes-off autonomous system.”
At present, only Mercedes-Benz offers a true hands-free, eyes-free driving system. But that system, Drive Pilot, only works in California or Nevada, during the daytime with clear weather, only on approved highways and only under 40 mph.
Mercedes officials have said that its system’s expansion is limited by the lack of a national regulation set in America governing autonomous cars. As for how GM plans to surmount that problem, Anderson was cagey. “Certain states are open, certain states are not,” he said. “Right now, we’ll take it as we go.”
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
