GM rolling out its amazing Super Cruise tech to more cars and brands

Enlarge (credit: Cadillac)

The Cadillac CT6 was one of the more memorable vehicles I've tested this year. That's because it came equipped with Super Cruise, the latest advanced driver assistance system to come out of General Motors' R&D. In my review, I said GM should do what it takes to make Super Cruise available on every model year 2020 vehicle it makes. Although the automaker hasn't quite gone that far, on Tuesday it announced that Super Cruise will be available on every MY2020 Cadillac. A year later, we should see the system show up as an option in other GM brands.

Super Cruise is an evolution of the adaptive cruise control and lane keeping you may have in your own car, but it adds a couple of important new features that even Tesla's very capable Autopilot lacks. First, it's geofenced and will only work on the 130,000+ miles of highways in the US and Canada that GM has lidar mapped. Restricting its operational domain like this means the system will encounter many fewer of the complicated edge cases that keep autonomous driving engineers up late at night. And you'll be glad to know that the mapping is a constant process; anecdotally I'm hearing that Super Cruise drives better now than it did several months ago in places like California.

Second, Super Cruise comes with a proper driver-monitoring system. That's important, because Super Cruise is not a fully autonomous system; it's not even at level 3 of the increasingly unhelpful SAE levels of self-driving. So the human behind the wheel is always responsible for situational awareness. To this end, Super Cruise only works if it sees you're paying attention to the road ahead. An infrared camera on the steering column tracks your head position and gaze. Look away from the road for more than a few seconds and the warnings start. Ignore the audio, visual, and haptic feedback for 15 seconds, and Super Cruise disengages.

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