Cadillac brings ‘hands-free’ Super Cruise feature to more cars

Autonomous driving is slowly but surely rolling out to even more customers. Tesla announced last week that its semi-autonomous driving feature, Autopilot — which can steer and change lanes on its own — will be a part of all its electric cars ordered online. And now General Motors is adding more self-driving features to its cars with its Super Cruise hands-free system.

Super Cruise works a lot like Autopilot, with sensors and cameras and GPS guiding the car, but only on certain highways across the U.S. and Canada, where the computer knows the route. Unlike with Autopilot, drivers don’t have to keep their hands on the wheel. A small camera trained on the driver detects when drivers need to snap to attention —and then notifies and alerts drivers to get back into driving mode. Until then, you are literally just sitting behind the wheel, watching the road go by.

Self-driving autonomy is based on a scale of 0 to 5, with Level 5 a fully self-driving car. We’re not all the way there yet, but Level 2 and 3 autonomy, which offers a mix of human and computer driving, is increasingly widely available, like with Super Cruise and Autopilot. 

The new Cadillac sedan, the CT5, will include Super Cruise as the start of GM’s plan to offer the hands-free driving assistance in all new cars starting in 2020. (The car will first come out this fall without Super Cruise.)

Super Cruise was previously only available in the Cadillac CT6 luxury sedan. But now the hands-free driving tool that works on 130,000 miles of mapped-out highways across the country is more widely available. Well, kind of — it’s only going to be in two Cadillac models to start and is limited to routes Cadillac has programmed into the system.

The car is making its first appearance at the New York Auto Show this week, and although there’s no price yet on the new model, predecessors like the Cadillac CTS start around $46,000. Expect this one to be in that ballpark, too.

Cadillac is filling the car with a lot of tech beyond Super Cruise. It has a 10-inch screen up front and advanced driver assistance tools like automatic braking, advanced cruise control, parking assistance, and a rear camera mirror, which is much more than a mirror — it actually plays back HD live video of your surroundings. 

Take that, Tesla.