|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
General Motors GM is promising that within about two years drivers will be able to take their eyes off the road in some of its vehicles, and it is now widening the plan beyond a single luxury electric SUV. At its annual GM Forward technology showcase in New York on Wednesday, the company said its “eyes-off” highway driving system will debut on an updated 2028 Cadillac Escalade IQ and then spread to its best-selling gas-powered full-size SUVs and light-duty pickups, followed by crossovers, according to coverage of the event by AutoConnectedCar and BigGo Finance. Executives did not give a launch date for the broader rollout, so 2028 applies only to the first vehicle.
The commitment itself is not new. GM first promised eyes-off driving on October 22, 2025, naming the all-electric Escalade IQ as the launch vehicle for 2028, and the company’s own announcement said the system would begin on highways. What changed this week is the scale and the supporting detail. The expansion to high-volume trucks and SUVs matters commercially, since the Escalade IQ is an expensive electric vehicle with relatively low sales, while the gas-powered trucks and large SUVs are what GM sells in volume, as AutoConnectedCar noted. Putting the technology on those models would turn a showcase feature into a mainstream one if it works as promised.
To understand what “eyes-off” means, start with what GM sells today. Super Cruise is a hands-free driver assistance system that works on pre-mapped highways but requires the driver to keep watching the road, using eye-tracking to check, according to Axios. Eyes-off driving goes a step further: on approved roads, the car drives itself and the person behind the wheel can look away, read or watch a screen, until the system asks them to take over. In industry terms, that is SAE Level 3 automation, which Wards Auto described as the most ambitious part of GM’s plans. A Level 3 system carries more responsibility for the driving task, which raises hard questions about safety validation and legal liability that no manufacturer has fully settled.
GM says it has real-world data to back its confidence. The company said Super Cruise customers have driven more than 1.2 billion hands-free miles across nearly 750,000 vehicles, up from the 700 million miles it cited a year earlier, according to AutoConnectedCar’s report. That growth shows how quickly the system has been adopted, though hands-free miles on mapped highways are a different challenge from a car that is responsible for the driving while its occupant looks away. Mandi Damman, GM’s executive chief engineer, said Escalade IQ test vehicles carry redundant steering, braking and 12-volt power in addition to the sensor suite, a reminder that Level 3 depends on backup systems that can keep the car safe if a primary component fails.
The technology stack is also different from Tesla’s. GM’s system will use a mix of lidar, radar and cameras, according to Axios and TechCrunch, whereas Tesla has long argued that cameras and neural networks are enough. GM’s approach draws on Super Cruise and on the work of Cruise, the driverless car unit it folded into the company, whose technology GM said was trained on five million driverless miles. TechCrunch reported last year that Mercedes was the only automaker with a commercially available hands-off, eyes-off system in the United States, which means GM would join a small group if it delivers on schedule. Whether that is still true today is not addressed in the coverage reviewed.
Behind the autonomy plan sits a hardware overhaul. GM is replacing dozens of scattered electronic control units with a liquid-cooled central computer that it says delivers 40 times the computing power of current hardware and cuts wiring by 30 percent, according to BigGo Finance’s account. GM’s 2025 announcement said the architecture would unite propulsion, steering, braking, infotainment and safety over a high-speed Ethernet backbone, with up to 35 times more AI performance and 1,000 times more bandwidth than its previous systems. The unit debuts on the 2028 Escalade IQ and is slated to reach gas-powered full-size SUVs and trucks, three-row crossovers and fourth-generation EVs. Because eyes-off driving depends on additional sensors, centralized computing and backup hardware, existing Super Cruise vehicles should not be expected to gain the full capability through a software update, Green Cars noted.
AI is the other half of the strategy. GM said vehicles will use conversational AI built on Google’s Gemini beginning in 2026, and later its own custom AI tied to OnStar, according to TipRanks. This week’s event added that an AI-driven OnStar assistant will arrive on the 2027 Cadillac Lyriq. The company is presenting the car as a computer that improves through software, which is consistent with the push for software revenue that BigGo described. For drivers, the practical effect would be more features delivered after purchase, and more subscriptions. Super Cruise already requires a monthly subscription of about $40, according to Axios’s 2025 report, and GM executives declined to say what the eyes-off system would cost.
There are limits on where and how any of this can be used. GM has said availability and permissible use will vary by state, and KTLA reported that only a few states, including California and Nevada, currently permit eyes-off, hands-off driving, according to AutoConnectedCar. That means a car could carry the hardware but be allowed to use the feature only in certain places, a patchwork that regulators will need to resolve before the technology can scale. GM’s claim that the system will work on highways it has not mapped, made by software chief Baris Cetinok in 2025, adds flexibility, but the company has also not confirmed that eyes-off will work on every road where today’s Super Cruise operates, as InsideEVs noted last year.
It is worth treating the announcement with some caution. The timeline of 2028 is a target, and self-driving programs across the industry have repeatedly slipped. Several details remain open: the price, the first states and roads where the system will be allowed, how the car will hand control back to a driver, and who is responsible if something goes wrong while a human is not watching. GM’s description of the safety benefits is the company’s own, and no independent testing of the eyes-off system has been published in the reports reviewed. The company also does not say how many vehicles outside the Escalade IQ will get the feature or when.
For consumers, the immediate takeaway is modest. Nothing changes in showrooms today, and the new capability is more than a model year away even in the most optimistic case. Buyers considering a GM vehicle now should not assume that today’s Super Cruise will be upgraded to eyes-off through software alone. For the industry, the message is that the contest is moving from hands-free to eyes-free, with companies betting different combinations of sensors, computing power and maps. GM’s own announcements are collected on its GM newsroom, and TechCrunch has an early account of the plan in its report on the 2028 system.
Readers who follow global technology, mobility and business stories can find more coverage at BusinessTech Nigeria. If GM delivers, the 2028 Escalade IQ will be remembered as the moment a mainstream automaker asked drivers to look away, and the first test will be how much trust they are willing to give.
