General Motors to offer ‘eyes-off’ driving, with help from Cruise, to market in 2028

General Motors Co. announced plans to bring “eyes-off” driving to market at its GM Forward media event in New York this week. The company said it will roll out the technology in the 2028 Cadillac ESCALADE IQ electric SUV.

GM said it has already mapped 600,000 miles of hands-free driving on North American roads. The automaker claimed that customers have driven 700 million miles with Super Cruise without a single reported crash attributed to the system.

The technology and validation frameworks from Cruise add more than 5 million fully driverless miles of experience, it noted. Cruise was GM’s self-driving venture that operated services in San Francisco, Austin, Houston, and Phoenix. It had plans to expand to more than a dozen cities in 2024.

Cruise technology lives on

Since acquiring Cruise in 2016, General Motors poured more than $10 billion into the self-driving startup.

However, in 2023, Cruise faced struggles that led to GM pulling its funding for the startup’s robotaxi deployment. Instead, GM combined the Cruise and GM technical teams to focus on Super Cruise, GM’s hands-free driver assistance system.

The company said its combination of technology, scale, a decade of real-world deployment experience, and safety systems developed and tested for Super Cruise gives it the foundation to deliver the next phase of personal autonomy.

At the event, GM Chair and CEO Mary Barra and other senior leaders also unveiled advancements across AI, robotics, and energy. For example, the Detroit company is rolling out conversational AI features on its vehicles, debuting a new centralized computing system, and enabling its electric vehicles to provide backup power from their batteries to properly equipped homes.

General Motors bets on personal AVs

While Cruise and other autonomous vehicle (AV) developers such as Waymo have focused on developing robotaxis, GM is betting on personal autonomous vehicles. Unlike with robotaxis, which work in geofenced areas that are sometimes mapped multiple times a day, personal AVs need to handle any roads under any condition.

Tesla has long been a frontrunner when it comes to personal vehicle technology. Its “full self-driving” (FSD) software first came to the streets in 2020. While the company’s technology has matured since then, it still requires a human driver to pay attention to the road and be ready to take over at all times.

Tesla has also expanded into robotaxi operations this year. In June, the company officially launched its robotaxi service in Austin, which has expanded multiple times since its initial launch. So far, Tesla’s robotaxis are operating with a safety monitor in the passenger seat.

Unlike Tesla, which relies on cameras, GM’s eyes-off capability will use vision, lidar, and radar. It could also allow drivers to enjoy conversational AI with Google Gemini and in-cabin entertainment options, noted the company.

Automaker to deploy cobots across its assembly facilities

General Motors also shared progress on how it’s scaling its robotics work at the Autonomous Robotics Center (ARC) in Warren, Mich., and a sister lab in Mountain View, Calif.

More than 100 roboticists, AI engineers, and hardware specialists are building advanced robotics systems trained on decades of GM production data, such as telemetry, quality metrics, and sensor feeds from thousands of robots. Their goal is to create AI that learns and improves with every manufacturing cycle.

ARC is also developing software and manipulation components for force- and power-limited robots or cobots, which GM is deploying in its U.S. assembly plants this year. The automaker said this will create an adaptive and efficient manufacturing environment where intelligent machines improve safety and workplace quality. It has worked with NVIDIA and FANUC in building up its automation capabilities.