GM expanding Super Cruise semi-autonomous driver-assist system to 22 vehicles by 2023
- GM plans to expand its Super Cruise semi-autonomous highway driver-assist system to 22 vehicles by 2023.
- The system, like Tesla's Autopilot, uses a host of sensors, radars and cameras to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within the car's lane.
- GM currently offers Super Cruise exclusively on the Cadillac CT6, which ended production last month.
DETROIT — General Motors plans to expand its Super Cruise semi-autonomous highway driver-assist system to 22 vehicles by 2023, including 10 by next year, the company announced Wednesday.
The system uses a host of sensors, radars and cameras to steer, accelerate and brake automatically within the car's lane. GM last month said it's upgrading the next generation of Super Cruise to feature lane-changing capabilities similar to Tesla's Autopilot.
GM currently offers Super Cruise exclusively on the Cadillac CT6, which ended production last month. It announced it would offer the upgraded system on two Cadillac sedans and the upcoming Cadillac Escalade, which it unveiled Tuesday night, during the second half of this year.
GM President Mark Reuss, who announced the news Wednesday during an investor day, did not disclose all the vehicles that would offer the technology, but he said they will include full-size pickups and SUVs.
"We are rolling this out in a very big way," he said during the event in New York, which was broadcast online.
The automaker previously said it would expand Super Cruise to all Cadillac models and to other brands beginning in 2021.
GM launched Super Cruise in 2017, two years after Tesla debuted Autopilot. The Detroit automaker has been extremely conservative in its rollout of the technology, despite development of the system going back a decade or so.
Due to the slower launch cadence and additional safeguards, Super Cruise has not received as much attention or scrutiny as Autopilot. Tesla has faced questions about Autopilot's role in at least three fatal crashes and about allowing driver misuse.
Unlike Autopilot, Super Cruise is limited to more than 200,000 miles of limited-access freeways in the U.S. and Canada that have been lidar-mapped to assist the on-board system of cameras, radars and sensors. It also uses facial recognition to identify whether the driver is paying attention so there's no need for drivers to touch the steering wheel while the system is operating.
Correction: GM plans to expand its Super Cruise semi-autonomous highway driver-assist system to 22 vehicles by 2023. The company provided the wrong year in an earlier version of this article.