July 4, 2025 - BlueCruise Gets Better, But Still Not Caught Up

This is the Telemetry Transportation Daily, and I'm Sam Abuelsamid, VP of Market Research at Telemetry.

It's now been almost 8 years since I first drove a Cadillac CT6 with GM's hands-free Super Cruise assist system, and to this day, it remains the most impressive system of its type. In 2022, Ford launched it's own competitor called Blue Cruise on the Mustang Mach-E and F-150.  Unfortunately, Blue Cruise was something of a disappointment in its original variants. Like Super Cruise and other systems, it was only enabled for use on divided highways (although Super Cruise is now available on many other roads as well). However, while Super Cruise was able to handle almost all highway curves, using its high-definition maps as a look-ahead sensor to slow the vehicle for some tighter curves, Blue Cruise would just give up and ask the driver to take the wheel, surprisingly frequently. 

Ford has since released several updates that progressively made performance a little better, but still not as good as Super Cruise. Finally, this spring, with the release of version 1.4 on the new Expedition and Lincoln Navigator, it has been able to get through some problematic curves around the area where I live in Michigan. It did still have issues with disengaging while in HOV lanes in California as it was apparently confused by the additional road markings. Ford has now also released v1.5, starting with the 2025 Mach-E, and while I haven't had the chance to try it on HOV lanes yet, it is truly a solid step forward. Along with general performance updates, the big new feature is automatic overtaking. V1.2 introduced lane change on demand when the driver taps the turn signal stalk. V1.5 will now indicate to the driver that it will do a lane change when following a slower vehicle, with the driver having the option to cancel it with the turn signal. The system works very smoothly, never jerking the car aroun,d although it is fairly conservative about when it will execute the lane change. During a multi-hour drive to central Ohio, there were numerous instances where there were more than adequate gaps in a line of vehicles in the left lane that I would be comfortable manually switching lanes, Blue Cruise held off in the interest of safety. I'm actually ok with that, I don't think automated systems should be that aggressive.  The overall performance of Blue Cruise still isn't quite on a par with Super Cruise, but it is much closer than it was 3 years ago. Now Ford just needs to address my other concerns with the human machine interface to make it more clear what the mode is and add capacitive sensors to the steering wheel to actively detect hands when not in hands-free mode and avoid false positive alerts to put hands on the wheel. 

Thanks for listening.