GM to introduce eyes-off, hands-off driving system in 2028 

General Motors says it plans to introduce an automated driving system that will allow drivers to keep their eyes off the road and hands off the wheel, starting with the 2028 Cadillac Escalade IQ.

The announcement, made Wednesday at its GM Forward event in New York City, comes a year later TechCrunch first reported it That automaker was working on the system.

GM says its hands-off advanced driver assistance system, known as Super Cruise, is the cornerstone of this future, more capable product. The Super Cruise, which launched in 2017 and is now available in 23 vehicle models, can be used for nearly 600,000 miles on highways.

This new blinds, hands-off driver assistance system – which will use lidar, radar and cameras for perception – will also debut on highways. GM CEO Mary Barra noted during the event that GM will roll out its blindfolded product faster than its hands-off Super Cruise ADAS.

The automaker said it tapped the experience of engineers who worked at its now-shuttered autonomous vehicle technology subsidiary Cruise to improve that system’s capabilities. when GM Discontinues Cruise, Its commercial robotaxi business, in December 2024, absorbed the subsidiary and combined it with its own efforts to develop driver assistance features. Over the past year, GM has also hired several cruise engineers in pursuit of its goal of developing fully autonomous personal vehicles.

GM said it is also feeding the Cruise’s technology stack, which includes AI models trained on 5 million driverless miles and a simulation framework running in virtual test scenarios, into its next-generation driver-assistance and autonomy programs.

“Robotaxi makes a lot of sense as a proof of concept when you start out,” Sterling Anderson, GM’s executive vice president of global products and former co-founder of AV startup Aurora Innovations, said during the event, noting the high cost of sensors and the high use of those vehicles to calculate autonomous vehicles.

“We’re now in a position in 2025 where the industry has drastically reduced the cost of some hardware,” Anderson said. “And GM, individually, has the manufacturing capacity, the manufacturing capacity, to put these out in much larger volume and at a much lower cost. If the industry had low-cost systems and a huge installed base and manufacturing capacity to begin with, we could probably all start personal autonomous vehicles.”

In the United States, Mercedes is currently the only automaker with a commercially available hands-off, eyes-off system. Such systems would fall under SAE’s Level 3 of Automation, which refers to an automated system that can operate itself under certain conditions but may still require a human to take over. Mercedes’ Drive Pilot is only available on certain mapped highways in California and Nevada and only works in heavy, low-speed traffic.

GM’s blindfolded product will work on highways that GM hasn’t mapped, according to Barris Setinock, GM’s senior vice president of software and services. He added that the system would only require human takeover for things like off-ramps and could handle emergencies and contingencies.

“Human intervention should not be an escape hatch for emergencies,” Cetinok said.

Going to market with blindfolded, hands-off driving systems will put GM ahead of other automakers, unless they get there first. Earlier this year, Unveil the Stellantis It has its own Level 3 system, but it stalled the launch. Tesla has been trying for years to create a “complete self-driving solution” relying solely on its cars’ cameras and neural networks, though its Autopilot and FSD systems still require drivers to keep their eyes on the road.