General Motors said it plans to launch an automated driving system in 2028 that will allow drivers to keep their eyes off the road and hands off the wheel, starting with the Cadillac Escalade IQ.
The announcement, made Wednesday at its GM Forward event in New York City, comes a year after TechCrunch first reported that the automaker was working on the system.
GM said its hands-off advanced driver assistance system, known as Super Cruise, is the foundation of this future, more capable product. Super Cruise, which launched in 2017 and is now available in 23 vehicle models, can be used on about 600,000 miles of highway.
This new eyes-off, hands-off driver assistance system — which will use lidar, radar, and cameras for perception — will also start on highways. GM CEO Mary Barra noted during the event that GM would roll out its eyes-off product faster than it did its hands-off Super Cruise ADAS.
The automaker said it has tapped the experience of engineers who worked at its now shuttered autonomous vehicle technology subsidiary Cruise to improve the capabilities of that system. When GM shut down Cruise, its commercial robotaxi business, in December 2024, it absorbed the subsidiary and combined it with its own efforts to develop driver assistance features. Over the last year, GM has also rehired several Cruise engineers as it pursues its goal of developing fully autonomous personal vehicles.
GM said it is also feeding Cruise’s technology stack, which includes AI models trained on five million driverless miles and a simulation framework running virtual test scenarios, into its next-generation driver assistance and autonomy programs.
“Robotaxi as a proof of concept when you start makes a lot of sense,” Sterling Anderson, GM’s executive vice president of global product and former co-founder of AV startup Aurora Innovation, said during the event, adding that the high cost of sensors and compute on autonomous vehicles required high utilization of those vehicles.
Techcrunch event
San Francisco
|
October 27-29, 2025
“We’re now in a position in 2025 where the industry broadly has brought down the cost tremendously of some of the hardware,” Anderson said. “And GM, uniquely, has the install base, the manufacturing capacity to put these out at much larger volumes and much lower costs. Had the industry had low-cost systems and a huge install base and manufacturing capacity to begin with, we probably all would have gone for personal autonomous vehicles to begin with.”
In the U.S., Mercedes is currently the only automaker with a commercially available hands-off, eyes-off system. Such systems would fall under the SAE’s Level 3 of automation, which refers to an automated system that can drive itself under certain conditions but might still require a human to take over. Mercedes’ Drive Pilot is only available on certain mapped highways in California and Nevada, and only functions in heavy, low-speed traffic.
GM’s eyes-off product will work on highways that GM hasn’t mapped, according to Baris Cetinok, GM’s senior vice president of software and services. He added that the system will only require human takeover for things like off-ramps, and can handle emergencies and sudden incidents.
“Human intervention should not be the escape hatch for sudden incidents,” Cetinok said.
Getting to market with an eyes-off, hands-off driving system would put GM ahead of most other automakers, unless they get there first. Earlier this year, Stellantis unveiled its own Level 3 system, but it has put the launch on hold. Tesla has been gunning to “solve full self-driving” by relying only on its cars’ cameras and neural networks for years, even though its Autopilot and FSD systems still require the driver to keep their eyes on the road.
