GM to Launch Eyes-Off Driving In 2028

General Motors has been working on automated driving systems (ADS) since at least the 1950s, when it produced a film featuring its Firebird II concept car. In 2017, GM launched the industry’s first-ever hands-free driving assistance system, Super Cruise, which remains one of the best systems of the type. At an event in New York City today, GM made a number of technology-related announcements, including the next major step beyond Super Cruise, a hands-off, eyes-off automation system that is scheduled to launch in 2028 on the Cadillac Escalade IQ. 

Cadillac Escalade IQ

GM’s Automated Driving History

Between that 1950s film and the debut of Super Cruise, GM continued its research on automated driving. In the 1990s, the automaker participated in research programs that involved a fleet of cars following markers embedded in a southern California highway. In the 2000s, GM supported the team from Carnegie Mellon University that won the 2007 DARPA Urban Challenge for automated vehicles with a heavily modified Chevrolet Tahoe. In 2010, GM built a small fleet of urban automated mobility pods known as the Electric Networked Vehicle or EN-V.  

Over the past decade, it bought a startup called Cruise that was developing robotaxis, which even began commercial deployment in 2022. That effort was ultimately shut down after a near-fatal crash with a pedestrian in San Francisco. Following the crash, GM re-examined the market for robotaxis and what it would take to make it a commercially viable business and concluded that it would be many years before such an application could be profitable. 

However, GM decided that it was worth bringing the knowledge from Cruise back in-house to apply to consumer vehicles. While most of the staff at Cruise who were involved in robotaxi operations lost their jobs, many of the engineers were hired by GM and integrated with the internal advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) team. The first result of the newly combined efforts is the eyes-off automated driving system that is targeted for a 2028 debut. 

Eyes Off The Road

These types of systems fall into the category of Level 3 (L3) automation as defined by the SAE International J3016 standard for assisted and automated driving systems. L3 means that the vehicle can handle the driving task under certain defined conditions, but at the limits of that operational design domain, a human driver must take over. 

This creates a number of challenges to ensure that the driver has sufficient time to fully regain situational awareness before resuming control, and it’s one of the reasons that most automakers have avoided these systems to date. The GM system, which doesn’t yet have a brand, although some colleagues and I were joking that maybe it could be Super Cruise Pro Max Ultra or something along those lines, won’t be the first such system on the market, but based on what we know so far, it could be among the most capable. 

Honda launched a system on the Japanese market on the Legend sedan several years ago, but only about 100 were sold. Mercedes-Benz offers its Drive Pilot system on the S-Class in Germany and in the U.S., but it’s limited to use on specific roads in Nevada and California. BMW also offers an L3 system on the 7 Series sedan in Germany. Currently, all of these are limited to operation in traffic jam conditions on highways at speeds up to just 60 km/h. Stellantis had planned to launch its own system based on the BMW system and called AutoDrive, but recently announced that it was cancelled and it would develop a new system. 

In the recently published Telemetry Assisted and Automated Driving Forecast report, we projected that by 2030, nearly 2.8 million vehicles would be sold globally with hands-off/eyes-off automation. By 2035, that number is expected to grow another tenfold to nearly 29 million. That would put these systems second to hands-off/eyes-on systems (known as L2+) like Super Cruise in the global market. 

What Will It Take?

The current systems on the market have sold in extremely low volumes and have very limited utility. Why would so many consumers possibly be interested in such a system? The simple answer is that they wouldn’t, but that’s not what automakers are promising for the next generation of such systems.

Volkswagen Group is expected to launch an L3 system developed by Mobileye and branded as Chauffeur in 2027. Honda has announced that its new 0 Series EVs launching in 2026 will also have L3 capabilities, although the specific timing of when that feature will launch is still unknown. Ford has also tasked a group of engineers who formerly worked at Argo AI with developing L3 systems for its vehicles. Numerous other vehicles, including the Volvo EX90, the upcoming EX60 and Polestar 3, the Lucid Air and Gravity, and many Chinese EVs already have the hardware needed for safe L3 operation and just require software upgrades. Those updates are expected to start rolling out over the next several years. 

These new systems are planned to provide initial capabilities that include driving at typical highway speeds of up to 80 mph or more. In the case of the GM system, the initial rollout is expected to include highway speed driving all across North America in good weather conditions. Over time, GM plans to expand that to include inclement weather and more roads. When Super Cruise debuted, it worked on 130,000 miles of divided highways. By the end of 2025, it's planned to be 750,000 miles of roads, including many two-lane rural roads. 

In order to achieve this, all of these vehicles have far more compute capacity and sensing capability than was readily available on the 2017 Cadillac CT6 with Super Cruise. Unlike Tesla, which relies only on cameras for its hands-on Full Self-Driving, all of these other systems include multiple sensor types, including cameras, radar, and lidar, to provide a robust detection capability of the world around the vehicle. 

The Mobileye Chauffeur System runs on multiple EyeQ6 Hi system-on-chip (SoC) processors, the Volvo/Polestar models are getting upgrades to dual Nvidia Orin SoCs, and new BMW models are using Qualcomm SnapDragon Ride SoCs. All of these provide hundreds of trillions of operations per second (TOPS). The GM system will be the first from that automaker switching from the current Qualcomm platform to Nvidia's new Thor SoC that delivers 1,000 TOPS. 

GM is shifting from its traditional approach of having suppliers design electronic control units for the systems in its vehicles to a build-to-print model. That means GM will be handing the entire electronic design in-house, although it's working closely with Nvidia on integration. GM will then provide the design to whichever supplier is selected to manufacture the compute units, which will be the core of a new centralized electrical/electronic architecture. 

With a shift toward an entirely new E/E architecture, GM will have to rewrite most of its software as well. This is an effort that has been ongoing for some time, but GM will have to prove that it can actually execute this properly. That’s something that most legacy automakers, including GM, have struggled with so far. However, over the last two years, GM has put a lot more effort into revamping its software development and validation processes, including its new Sloan software test lab in Warren, Michigan. 

Why Is GM Doing This?

Why are so many automakers, including GM, pursuing this path? It all comes down to subscription revenues. Automakers and financial markets love the idea of recurring revenues in perpetuity, long after a vehicle is purchased. The problem is figuring out what consumers will actually pay for. BMW has famously tried to get customers to pay subscription fees for Apple CarPlay and heated seats, and given up on that. But two things that there does seem to be a willingness to subscribe to are connectivity and automation. 

GM revealed earlier this year that 20% of owners were paying a subscription to continue using Super Cruise after the initial three-year trial period ended. Ford has also had some success with subscriptions to its hands-off Blue Cruise, and Tesla does the same with enhanced Autopilot and Full Self-Driving. 

The ability to get actual eyes-off automated driving is seen as a key subscription driver in the coming years, so everyone is pursuing it. It’s going to be many years before it gets past premium models, but just as you can now get Super Cruise in the new Chevrolet Bolt, the same will eventually happen with L3 systems. Eventually, L3 will also evolve into full L4 capability and potentially drive even more revenue growth. That’s going to take longer for consumer vehicles, but the ability to nap on a long road trip definitely has appeal.