GM's Super Cruise Autonomous Driving System Coming to Other Models

author: Jacky Ho   

General Motors is expanding its Super Cruise autonomous driving system, which allows drivers to ride hands-free on the highway, to Cadillac's entire lineup starting in 2020 and later to other GM brands. Currently, Super Cruise only available on the Cadillac CT6.

Super Cruise is "a feature that customers routinely come into dealerships asking about, shopping for, and specifically ordering," said GM product chief Mark Reuss in a prepared speech for the Intelligent Transportation Society of America conference in Detroit Wednesday. "Making it available in every Cadillac on the showroom floor just makes sense."

Cadillac is also rolling out V2X communication technology in a "high volume crossover" by 2023. Cadillac just revealed its first-ever compact SUV, the XT4, at the New York auto show in March.

V2X is an industry term for "vehicle to everything or vehicle-to-infrastructure" communication. It's thought to be the next step in automotive safety systems, allowing a car to communicate with everything from traffic lights to other vehicles.

"Cadillac is proud to be the leader for the company's innovation," Steve Carlisle, Cadillac's new president, said in a statement. "Groundbreaking technologies like these continue to provide unparalleled comfort and convenience for our customers."

Super Cruise made its debut on the 2018 Cadillac CT6, designed to compete with Tesla's Autopilot system and marking the first semi-autonomous driver assist system to use precision LiDAR map data and real-time cameras, sensors and GPS to guide the vehicle on the highway.

The system also uses facial recognition to monitor the driver attentiveness. If a driver is not paying attention to the road ahead, the system issues an alert the driver. If a driver is completely unresponsive, the CT6 is able to come to a controlled stop and GM's OnStar service will alert rescue personnel.

For safety, the Super Cruise system only activates on a divided highway. The system can be activated on 130,000 miles of freeways in the U.S. and Canada for hands free driving, GM said in a statement. The precise highway mapping achieves 5 cm of scan accuracy.

GM is looking to take the lead in autonomous driving technology. The Detroit automaker, and its self-driving arm GM Cruise, which just secured $2.25 billion in funding from Japan's Softbank, is hoping to be among the first to deploy a wide-scale driverless taxi service in a yet-to-be-named city next year.

In San Francisco, where Cruise is headquartered, the company is testing a fleet of self-driving Chevy Bolts it calls Cruise AV's for the upcoming service.

In January, GM debuted its production-ready version of the Cruise AV for the service, the first autonomous ready production car without a steering wheel or pedals.

Jacky Ho