Earlier this year General Motors (GM) announced they will be improving their Super Cruise (their version of Tesla’s Autopilot) later this year to add the ability to do automatic lane changes.
Super Cruise currently only works on highways, but according to a recent interview at Citi’s 2020 Car of the Future Symposium, GM is currently working on the feature to be able to handle self-driving on city streets.
Along with the added feature, GM will be updating the name from Super Cruise to Ultra Cruise, according to their vice president of global product development, Doug Parks.
“We’re trying to take that same capability off the highway. Ultra cruise would be all of the Super Cruise plus the neighbourhoods, city streets and subdivisions. So Ultra Cruise’s domain would be essentially all driving, all the time.“
Despite the advancements in the technology, Parks stressed that this would not be fully autonomous driving, and the driver would still need to pay attention and be able to take over control of the vehicle at a moment’s notice, “What we’re not saying is that Ultra Cruise will be fully autonomous 100% of the time, although that could be one of the end games,“.
No timelines were provided for when the Ultra Cruise might become available. It will likely be a long time until we see it in any of GM’s production vehicles, as the automaker has yet to fully roll-out Super Cruise with automatic lane changes to its lineup.
Tesla has yet to release self-driving on city streets, though the automaker says it is coming soon. Tesla recently released the ability for its vehicles equipped with the Full Self-Driving (FSD) package to respond to traffic lights and stop signs. The feature is expected to hit Canada any day now.
h/t [Autoblog]
