Cadillac has announced that engineers are taking its “Super Cruise” semi-autonomous driving system to public driving roads, suggesting that General Motors and its luxury brand plan on doing more with the technology than just putting on a PR show. In fact, Cadillac officially projects that this technology could find itself in production vehicles later this decade, which makes us wonder if the system will be one of the many innovations debuting with the Cadillac LTS, the name rumored to be reserved for the brand’s Omega-based flagship vehicle.
The Super Cruise system is capable of semi-automated driving including hands-off lane following, braking, and speed control under certain driving conditions. The system is designed to ease the driver’s workload on freeway driving conditions only, in bumper-to-bumper traffic and on long road trips. Keep in mind that it is only meant to ease the workload on the driver, and the driver’s attention and occasional input may still be required. Operational limitations based on external factors such as traffic, weather, and visibility of lane markings mean that the driver needs to stay alert. When reliable data is not available, such as when there are no lane markings, the system will prompt the driver to resume steering.
To perform these actions, Super Cruise test vehicles utilize a fusion of radar, ultrasonic sensors, cameras, and GPS map data in a way that’s seamlessly integrated into the prototypes for a near-production appearance. To date, the development of Super Cruise has included testing on closed courses and in a driving simulator, as well as limited driving on real roads. When testing is eventually completed, GM engineers expect to have accumulated hundreds of thousands of miles of driving in various environments, including day and night driving, and a variety of weather and traffic conditions.
Comments
Super Cruise sounds nice, but how about a Super Sport Cruze? Haha 😉
Dude did gm start building the Silverado today???
Wow, never heard of this before, sounds great. I guess with drive-by-wire steering you have the motors there to guide the wheel. This is a great feature, glad MBZ and Lexus didn’t do it first (to my knowledge). Cadillac, the “penalty of leadership”!
http://www.wcroberts.org/Paige_History/Images/1915-01-02%20Cadillac.html
That should give the passenger behind the wheel time to relax and have a beer.
It’s nice to drive a car & not have things like electric handbrakes etc getting in the way of it, there is no worse feeling that the car is in control & is driving its self or is correcting any mistakes for you.
Yes and no! I think we all like ABS brakes correcting mistakes for us. I don’t like all the stupid safety interlocks they keep putting in- on my old Cad Coupe Deville I could release the trunk while the car was still in drive, so when I came to a stop it would pop up, pretty cool. They put an interlock preventing this in my Seville STS- hated it.
If it not for lawyers, we could probably have it today. Damn it, let us do the testing!
I volunteer to drive a Cadillac ELR with Super Cruise for free! Just send the details with the car to my home!
Yes, and kill how many innocent people in the process? -_-
“ease the drivers work load” “drivers attention is still required” “driver needs to stay alert” I smell a disaster in the making here. This technology might be wonderful and useful on the freeway with no one else around, but in certain situations occurring suddenly it might prove to be frightening. Just me being my usual skeptic is all.