GM is working on a hands-off advanced driving system for city streets

GM has a big team" working on an advanced version of its hands-free driving assistance system, Super Cruise, that will expand its capability beyond highways and apply it to city streets, the automaker's vice president of global product development Doug Parks said Tuesday.

GM is also continuing to improve its existing Super Cruise product, Parks said during a webcasted interview at Citi's 2020 Car of the Future Symposium.

As we continue to ratchet up Super Cruise, we continue to add capability and not just highway roads," Parks said, adding that a separate team is working on the hands-free city driving product known internally as Ultra Cruise."

We're trying to take that same capability off the highway," he said. Ultra cruise would be all of the Super Cruise plus the neighborhoods, city streets and subdivisions. So Ultra Cruise's domain would be essentially all driving, all the time."

Parks was quick to add that this would not be autonomous driving. Advanced driving assistance systems have become more capable, but they still require a human driver to take control and to be paying attention.

What we're not saying is that Ultra Cruise will be fully autonomous 100% of the time, although that could be one of the end games," Parks said.

Parks didn't provide a timeline for when Ultra Cruise might be available. A GM spokesperson said in a statement after his interview that the company continues to expand its hands-free driver assistance system technology across its vehicle portfolio and has teams looking at how we can expand the capabilities to more scenarios."

GM said it does not have a name or anything specific to announce today, but stay tuned."

This new Ultra Cruise feature would put it in competition with Tesla's Autopilot advanced driving system, which is largely viewed as the most capable on the market today. Tesla's full self-driving" package, a more capable version of Autopilot, can now identify stop signs and traffic lights and automatically slows the car to a stop on approach. This feature is still considered to be in beta.

GM's Super Cruise uses a combination of lidar map data, high-precision GPS, cameras and radar sensors, as well as a driver attention system, which monitors the person behind the wheel to ensure they're paying attention. Unlike Tesla's Autopilot driver assistance system, users of Super Cruise do not need to have their hands on the wheel. However, their eyes must remain directed straight ahead.

GM has taken a slower approach to Super Cruise compared to Tesla's method of rolling out software updates that gives early access to some owners to test the improved features. When GM launched Super Cruise in 2017, it was only available in one Cadillac model - the full-size CT6 sedan - and restricted to divided highways. That began to change in 2019 when GM announced plans to expand where Super Cruise would be available.

GM's new digital vehicle platform, which provides more electrical bandwidth and data processing power, enabled engineers to add to Super Cruise's capabilities. In January, GM added a feature to Super Cruise that automated lane changes for drivers of certain Cadillac models, including the upcoming 2021 Escalade.

This enhanced version of Super Cruise includes better steering and speed control. The improved version will be introduced starting with the 2021 Cadillac CT4 and CT5 sedans, followed by the new 2021 Cadillac Escalade. The vehicles are expected to become available in the second half of 2020.