GM's Super Cruise Gets A Huge Hands-Free Driving Expansion (But Not Every Car Supports It)
GM's track record with self-driving tech has been marred with hiccups, despite the company once eyeing a moonshot of dethroning Tesla with its Ultra Cruise tech. Despite halting work on the ambitious project, the company continues to work on the current-gen Super Cruise tech by expanding the road network certified safe for hands-free driving.
Late in 2022, GM announced that it was doubling the road network to over 400K miles. Today, the company announced that the Super Cruise network is once again making a similar leap.
Unlike Tesla, which is increasingly shifting to RGB vision sensors instead of LiDAR kits, GM's Super Cruise tech integrates camera and LiDAR-mapped data to let cars drive without hands on the steering wheel. Notably, GM's self-driving tech stack is one of a kind because it is the only solution in the segment that supports trailering for rides like the 2024 Chevrolet Traverse or 2024 GMC Acadia.
The company says Super Cruise is now "growing to about 750,000 miles of compatible roads across the U.S. and Canada, including divided highways, major and minor highways." The network expansion has already begun and will go through 2025. The expanded road coverage will be added via updates to all compatible cars with the Super Cruise kit. GM notes it will take a month between the newly added roads in the Super Cruise network getting integrated in the brand's tech stack and appearing on a car's digital dashboard.
A big move for GM
Now, the company doesn't quite label Super Cruise as a fully self-driving solution in the same vein as Tesla's Autopilot or the Full Self-Driving (FSD) bundle, but the company has kept adding features that are inching towards that goal. In its press release, the carmaker claims Super Cruise, in its current form, offers facilities such as on-demand lane change, collaborative steering, hands-free trailering, and refined curved handling.
The system is brought to life by GM's OnStar infrastructure, a subscription-based in-car assistance system that enables, among other things, the Super Cruise facility. GM's resource page mentions that the self-driving architecture offers support for 22 GM cars across the Chevrolet and Cadillac brands. However, in its latest announcement, the carmaker notes that Super Cruise's expansion won't grace three vehicles — the Cadillac CT6, Chevrolet Bolt EUV, and the Cadillac XT6.
The company hasn't provided an official reason why these cars won't get the upgrade treatment. However, irrespective of leaving out a few cars out of the expanded Super Cruise road network, the latest move will go a long way in extending the brand's domain leadership. GM claims that with the latest expansion, Super Cruise now offers the most expansive network of self-driving-ready roads in North America, which it says is roughly six times what the nearest competitor offers.