GM's Ultra Cruise Technology Delayed Until 2024: A Look into the Future of Hands-Free Driving

Table Of Content

• GM Is Not Cancelling Ultra Cruise, Just Merging It With Super Cruise
• You can power your home for 21 days with a Chevy Silverado EV and GM’s new bidirectional charger
• Oops, Your lightbox has reached it's max.
• GM Announces Ultra Cruise, Enabling True Hands-Free Driving Across 95 Percent of Driving Scenarios
• GM’s Ultra Cruise will use radar, camera, and lidar to enable hands-free driving
• Only premium GM EVs will get Ultra Cruise capabilities
• Scout Motors wants to put the ‘mechanical’ back into electric trucks

The company says it will also work on improved engagement with first responders to facilitate trainings in each precinct it plans to operate in. Technological issues aside, what really put Cruise in hot water late last year was its response to the incident. Regulators accused the company of withholding information about the crash, only sharing that a Cruise robotaxi ran over a pedestrian who had been flung into its path after first being struck by a human-driven vehicle. The October incident wasn’t the first time Cruise’s technology has caused problems. Even as Cruise expanded to new cities in the second half of 2023, its robotaxis were routinely malfunctioning in cities like San Francisco and Austin, disrupting the flow of traffic, public transit and first responders. General Motors’ Cruise is redeploying robotaxis in Phoenix after nearly five months of paused operations, the company said in a blog post.

GM Is Not Cancelling Ultra Cruise, Just Merging It With Super Cruise

After years of teases, General Motors is finally pulling the curtain back on its next-generation “hands-free” driver-assist technology. Now Cruise appears to be going back to basics, a sharp pivot away from the aggressive growth strategy the company has been pursuing for the last few years. In 2022, former Cruise CEO and co-founder Kyle Vogt — who stepped down amid last year’s controversy — told investors that Cruise had “de-risked the technical approach” by applying what worked well in San Francisco to similar ride-share markets. In a groundbreaking development, General Motors (GM) has officially announced the delay of its highly... An infographic showing the Ultra Cruise sensor suite on the exterior of the Cadillac CELESTIQ. Ultra Cruise’s HMI strategy also includes helping the driver to stay engaged behind the wheel, ready to take over if required.

You can power your home for 21 days with a Chevy Silverado EV and GM’s new bidirectional charger

Ultra Cruise will join GM’s lineup of hands-free advanced driver-assist systems on select models in 2023, with Cadillac being the first to introduce the technology. The company’s main operations were historically based in San Francisco, but Cruise lost its permits to operate there following the accident. Despite challenges posed by inclement weather and roundabouts, Ultra Cruise boasts an impressive operability rate of 95% on various public paved roads throughout the United States, encompassing rural and urban environments alike. Now that Super Cruise is the dominant — and only — ADAS brand in GM’s portfolio, the automaker is revising its goals for partial automation. That includes reevaluating the goal of trying to achieve hands-free driving for 95 percent of scenarios as well as which sensors will be necessary to achieve these aims. Today, GM has shared more details of the sensors that will comprise Ultra Cruise driving as well as the automaker’s expansion plans for capable roadways around the US and Canada.

Oops, Your lightbox has reached it's max.

We have learned the vehicles will feature over 20 different sensors including long and short range cameras and radars, LiDAR (GM wouldn’t share the supplier yet), and an advanced driver monitoring system to ensure the driver remains attentive. GM says the sensors are not redundant but instead fuse together to give full, 360-degree sensory coverage of a given EV. Ultra Cruise’s compute, which is about the size of two laptops stacked together, will be available in 2023 on vehicles including the ultra-luxury, fully-electric Cadillac CELESTIQ.

GM Announces Ultra Cruise, Enabling True Hands-Free Driving Across 95 Percent of Driving Scenarios

At Level 2, the vehicle can control both steering and acceleration and deceleration, as well as monitor blind spots and even change lanes automatically. But it falls short of full autonomy because a human sits in the driver’s seat and can take control of the car at any time. The Cruise robotaxi arm ended last year with layoffs, the ouster of its founding CEO and a number of questions about its safety, the now-cancelled Bolt EV carried most of its electric sales and its stock price hasn't consistently grown in 10 years. But it's not walking away from the goal of more advanced automated driving, just leaning into a brand that most people know better anyway. So amid reports that the Ultra Cruise program was ending, a source familiar with the situation indicated GM was merging that program with Super Cruise.

Ultra Cruise will ultimately enable door-to-door hands-free driving on all public paved roads in the U.S. and Canada

General Motors Shuts Down Ultra Cruise Development To Focus On Super Cruise - CarBuzz

General Motors Shuts Down Ultra Cruise Development To Focus On Super Cruise.

Posted: Wed, 17 Jan 2024 08:00:00 GMT [source]

The company also works with suppliers who are experts in their relative spaces and integrates their sensing technologies with its homegrown software to bring Ultra Cruise to life. The news was announced as part of GM’s two-day annual investor event, in which GM also revealed its plan to double revenues by 2030 as it seeks to become a software company in addition to making cars. The mishandling of the information resulted in parent company GM slashing spending and taking greater control of Cruise.

GM’s Ultra Cruise will use radar, camera, and lidar to enable hands-free driving

Cruise will resume manual driving of its autonomous vehicles to create maps and gather road information in certain cities, starting with Phoenix, the company said Tuesday. The GM subsidiary already had a presence in Phoenix before it pulled its entire U.S.-based fleet last year following an incident in San Francisco that left a pedestrian stuck under and dragged by a Cruise robotaxi. The decision to do away with the Ultra Cruise brand comes as the automaker is dealing with the fallout of a pedestrian injury involving a driverless car operated by its wholly owned subsidiary Cruise. Several executives have resigned, and the company’s driverless vehicles have been taken off the road pending an internal investigation. The result is EVs that can control their own acceleration, braking, and automatic lane changes, but only on compatible roads. The American automaker continues to expand the availability of Super Cruise’s hands-free driving feature on roads throughout North America and has made excellent progress so far.

Only premium GM EVs will get Ultra Cruise capabilities

1Ultra Cruise Advanced Driver Assistance Technology functionality is currently in preproduction and subject to change. Capability will evolve over time by way of over-the-air updates once functionality becomes available. 2Safety or driver-assistance features are no substitute for the driver’s responsibility to operate the vehicle in a safe manner. The driver should remain attentive to traffic, surroundings and road conditions at all times. Read the vehicle Owner’s Manual for more important feature limitations and information.

Visit cadillacsupercruise.com, chevysupercruise.com, or gmc.com/connectivity-technology/super-cruise for compatible roads and full details. Automatic Lane Change and Lane Change on Demand are not available while trailering. Dubbed Ultra Cruise, the new system uses sensors like cameras, radars, and lidar to control a vehicle’s steering, acceleration, and braking. GM says the system can be used on 2 million miles of paved roads and in “95 percent” of driving scenarios. Though which vehicles will get Ultra Cruise is still a mystery; GM says it will be available in a handful of premium vehicles in 2023, though the automaker wouldn’t disclose specific models. The Celestiq will kick off GM’s lineup of premium EV offerings that will all come equipped with its new sensor suite and applicable software, but which model will follow the Cadillac remains a secret.

According to a pair of diagrams provided by GM, the lidar will be located inside the vehicle, behind the windshield and under the rearview mirror, where other automakers typically install sensors for advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS). Cameras can be found on the sideview mirrors, short-range radar in the lower corners of the grille and rear bumper, and long-range radars underneath the hood ornament and beneath the taillights. General Motors’ next-generation Ultra Cruise driver-assist system will come equipped with lidar as well as several other high-tech sensors designed to enable hands-free driving and cover “95 percent” of driving maneuvers, the automaker announced today. Ultra Cruise will cover more than 2 million miles of roads at launch in the United States and Canada, with the capacity to grow up to more than 3.4 million miles.

Prior to that incident, Cruise had been announcing launches in new cities — including Dallas, Houston and Miami — at a startling pace. First introduced in 2017, Super Cruise was GM’s first foray into hands-free driving. The system relies on a detailed map of the highway system, which are the only roads where it can be activated. General Motors is getting rid of the “Ultra Cruise” brand and merging the team that was working on it with the team responsible for Super Cruise, as the automaker reconsiders its goals for advanced driver-assist systems (ADAS).

The subtext was that GM wanted a system that rivaled Tesla’s Full Self-Driving, which is a Level 2 system that allows for hands-free driving on surface roads but still requires the driver to take control if required. Even though Tesla has been criticized for rolling out a beta version of its ADAS before it was actually ready, GM clearly thought that a next-generation hands-free driving system was worth pursuing. There is still a lot of research that needs to be done to fully investigate the safety claims made by automakers around ADAS features. There have been studies that show that the handoff between the automated system and a human driver can be especially fraught. GM is also developing an Ultra Cruise app that will be viewable in the center display of Ultra Cruise-equipped vehicles only when the vehicle is parked. The app will provide more centrally located information, including driver’s statistics, trips and history.

GM hasn’t said which additional models will be compatible with the driver-assist system. “We believe that the combination of different sensors, or sensor fusion, leads to the most robust hands-free driver-assist system for our customers,” said Parks. Designed around a combination of input from different sensors, cameras, radars and LiDAR, Ultra Cruise can generate accurate, 360-degree representations of the environment with redundancies in critical areas.

These recordings will then be processed through GM’s back office data ecosystem for continuous improvement of the system. “The combination of Ultra Cruise for premium offerings and Super Cruise for lower-cost products will enable us to offer driver-assist technology across price points and segments,” said Parks. Yes, its Human-Machine Interface (HMI) is what gives the system the ability to present information to the driver and communicate when the driver needs to take control of the vehicle.

Customers will be able to travel truly hands free with Ultra Cruise across nearly every road including city streets, subdivision streets and paved rural roads, in addition to highways. General Motors has shared more details of the technology and future capabilities we can expect to see in its next-generation Ultra Cruise ADAS, which was originally announced during its GM Investor Day presentation last year. The technology will debut on the upcoming premium Cadillac Celestiq EV in early 2024, although the exact driver assistance capabilities deployed at that time remain to be determined. The Snapdragon SoCs are designed with 5nm process technology, enabling superior performance and power efficiency.