What it's like riding in Cadillac’s self-driving Super Cruise for 350 miles
A new Cadillac drove me most of the way between Washington and Cleveland, and the car wouldn’t let me lose sight of that fact.
That roughly 376-mile road trip Tuesday in a pre-production 2018 CT6 sedan loaned by the GM (GM) subsidiary was my introduction to Super Cruise — Cadillac’s highways-only step into self-driving capability. Where everyday cruise control gives your foot a rest, Super Cruise liberates your hands. But not, as I quickly learned, your eyes.
The other hands-free mode
Here’s how it works: Once you’re on a controlled-access highway — with on- and off-ramps and oncoming traffic separated from your lanes, and which Cadillac has mapped — and you’ve engaged the usual cruise control, watch for a white steering-wheel icon to surface in the dashboard’s LCD screen.
When that indication of Super Cruise compatibility appears, you then press a button in the steering wheel to invoke the mode. After a few seconds, a light bar at the top of the wheel will illuminate in solid green — meaning you’re free to ignore every principle of safe driving and take your hands off the wheel.
The car will then keep itself centered in your lane with help from high-precision GPS, cameras to detect lane markings and radar to monitor other vehicles.
The CT6 ably dealt with slowing and merging traffic, and having the right lane closed off with orange cones didn’t faze it either. It only seemed confused for two brief moments: It jerked slightly to the right as we came off an overpass, then spent a few seconds hunting left and right in a stretch of road on which black squiggles of crack sealant obscured many lane markings.
Seeing the wheel turn unbidden was deeply weird. So was realizing how quickly I accepted the car driving me and trusted it not to sideswipe an 18-wheeler. I would have thought that 30 years of driving experience, much of it in a vehicle with a manual transmission, would have made me more reluctant to surrender control of a car.
But Super Cruise — included in the CT6’s $85,290 Platinum trim, a $5,000 option on its $66,290 Premium Luxury trim — won’t change lanes to pass a slower vehicle or move to the right to let a faster one pass. It treats the lane as a rail.
Pay attention, or else
wheeThe Super Cruise system’s cameras don’t just watch the road: One watches you to verify that you keep your eyes on the road, a feature that sets this apart from Tesla’s (TSLA) Autopilot.
If you don’t, that green bar in the steering wheel will start to blink. If you don’t then return your attention to the road, it will flash red and disengage Super Cruise. This happened repeatedly, especially early on as I took advantage of the car’s autonomous operation to take pictures and video.