General Motors has been one of the leaders in assisted, near-autonomous driving with its hands-off, eyes-up Super Cruise feature that debuted first on the 2018 Cadillac CT6. The system can take control of steering, stopping and accelerating on previously mapped roads in North America. It started with less than 200,000 miles and then quickly expanded to 400,000 miles of highway.
In 2021 GM meant to advance the system even further introducing Ultra Cruise, which would be reserved for its top-of-the-line vehicles like the six-figure electric Cadillac Celestiq. Plans changed at the beginning of the year with GM merging its Ultra Cruise and Super Cruise teams into one group, after the Super Cruise name was found to have more recognition with customers.
"Super Cruise obviously has brand equity, people know about it, they know what it feels like. They know where it operates, how it operates. They knew nothing about Ultra Cruise. So if we want to build trust with our customers, and we want them to go truly hands free, I don't think we can do that by having two separate brands," Jeff Miller, product manager for Super Cruise told Newsweek.
"Much of that consolidation of resources has allowed us to do this road expansion and we have more to come. We know our competitors are fast at our heels. So we're giving them more roads, but we're going to be working on more vehicles and more capability as well."
On Thursday it GM said it was nearly doubling its available Super Cruise road network again, bringing the total to about 750,000 hands-free miles in the U.S. and Canada. It uses navigation data and precision mapping on previously scanned highways to know where one of its vehicles should be. The system is now available on most Cadillacs, and many Chevrolet and GMC trucks and SUVs. It also recently added automatic lane change and trailering capability to the system, which can now compensate for the extra weight and length of towing.
The only systems that currently rival GM's are Tesla's Full Self Driving and Ford's Blue Cruise, all of which require a driver's eyes to stay on the road.
"If you take the analogy of a heart and cardiovascular system, there's a bunch of veins and arteries. So when we initially launched Super Cruise, our domain was those big arteries that kind of keep your organs supported. And then we did another expansion that kind of got into the the arms and the legs," Miller said.
"Now we're getting out into these smaller veins so to speak. We're not quite to the tips of your toes and fingers and fingernails or fingertips, but we're getting darn close."
Today's expansion adds minor highways that typically connect smaller cities and townships, says GM, which will add more options for those who camp, boat and use recreational vehicles. GM found through owner surveys that 4 out of 5 Super Cruise users say it makes driving more relaxing and noted that more than 160 million miles have been driven accident free.
"For new roads, we'll start driving all of say the local Southeast Michigan roads. All the engineers will be testing on these roads and then it will branch out it will spread out from there. We'll test in bigger chunks and take very large road trips over a fairly long period of time," Dave Craig, of the Super Cruise mapping team told Newsweek.
"And now once everybody's comfortable that Super Cruise works very well on these roads, then we start the major expansion. We work with a company called Dynamic Map Platform North America."
DMP provides the roadmap and then the team processes the map to create the in vehicle database. While processing the map GM run automated scripts on the map algorithms to verify that meter by meter, every single meter of that road meets our design requirements for Super Cruise," he said.
Some of the updated maps are already in the system, as they're downloaded incrementally over the air at no charge. GM says the only vehicles that won't be getting the updates are the Cadillac CT6, Chevrolet Bolt EUV and Cadillac XT6, which use the old mapping architecture. The average eligible vehicle will update its map within about one month of the GM brand site maps showing updated roads.
The overarching theme of this is using redundancy to keep drivers safe on the road when using the system.
"Let me touch on safe deployment. Our strategy here at General Motors, especially with Level 2 hands free, we're trying to build confidence and trust with the customer to truly let go of the wheel so that they can have that relaxing experience that 80 percent of our customers are having," Miller said.
He noted that the team doesn't want to make huge leaps and bounds in the technology where it gets something wrong, or the customer experience is not what is expected.
"Then we lose them forever. So much like we've operated today where we make incremental improvements, we're going to continue to operate in that manner. And we're only going to launch those incremental improvements when we're confident they're ready for the customers. We do not beta test on our customers. We do all of it up front in-house before keys get into customers hands," said Miller.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
Jake Lingeman is the Managing Editor for the Autos team at Newsweek. He has previously worked for Autoweek, The Detroit ... Read more
