(Credit: GM)
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GM today teased a major improvement coming to its Super Cruise self-driving tech by 2028.
Starting with the Cadillac Escalade IQ, drivers will be able to take their eyes off the road while the car drives itself on eligible highways. Turquoise lighting across the dashboard and exterior mirrors will be the "visual cue that it’s safe to sit back, read, or catch up on messages while the vehicle handles the drive," GM says. The exterior lights will also give other drivers on the road a heads-up, a concept Mercedes introduced in 2023.
"We selected blue to create clear visual differentiation from other vehicle alerts and driving modes," a GM spokesperson tells us. "Blue doesn't overlap with existing warning systems and provides an intuitive signal that the vehicle is in a distinct autonomous driving state."
This will be a major quality-of-life improvement for drivers, especially road trippers and commuters, assuming the tech advances to the point where it's safe.
When I tested GM's Super Cruise and Ford's Blue Cruise last year, the need to look at the road kept me on edge and made it difficult to fully relax. Both track your retinas, and if you read a text for too long, they will angrily beep at you to look back at the road. It's necessary for safety, but made me wonder if I'd rather just be driving myself.
GM takes a subtle jab at Tesla in its announcement, which insists its cameras-only self-driving platform is superior. "Unlike vision-only systems, GM’s approach is built on redundancy with LiDAR, radar, and cameras integrated into the vehicle’s design," the company says. "This provides a safe, reliable, and highly capable eyes-off autonomous system."
GM also owns the tech behind the now-defunct Cruise robotaxi brand, which would have been a competitor to Tesla's robotaxis had an unfortunate accident not taken them off the road in 2023. This new and improved self-driving technology will run on a revamped, centralized computing platform, also set to launch in 2028. It "represents a fundamental reimagining of how GM vehicles are built" and promises to bring "dramatic change," GM says.
It will power both gas and electric vehicles, aiming to consolidate "dozens" of independent control units into a "unified computing core." This will improve vehicle connectivity and "responsiveness to remote commands," GM says. It will also improve the rate of over-the-air software updates, delivering 10 times the new features as the previous system.
For self-driving, the new computing platform will deliver real-time safety updates, react in milliseconds, and evolve with each autonomous update, GM says. That constant learning is crucial to improving the system over time, as well as in real-time. The system also promises "1,000 times more bandwidth for faster connectivity, richer entertainment, and future AI."
Starting in 2026, GM will also introduce a conversational AI system into its vehicles, powered by Google Gemini. The idea is that you can "talk to your car as naturally as you would a fellow passenger," GM says. (Just don't fall in love.) In the future, the company will introduce its own, custom-built AI system, fine-tuned specifically for the vehicle, which can perform tasks such as answering questions about the vehicle.