GM Wants Your Truck to Run Errands Without You

The days of sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic to go pick up the dry cleaning or groceries might be coming to an end. That’s the vision General Motors laid out on Wednesday in New York City as part of its long-term vision.

The future will begin to take shape on public roads in the hands of consumers in 2028 when an updated Cadillac Escalade IQ launches with eyes-off highway driving functionality. Yes, you’ll be able to ride in the driver’s seat of the updated Escalade IQ and watch a movie as the car drives itself on the highway.

From there, GM plans to bring the system beyond its full-size luxury EV to its gas-powered vehicles, including its full-size light-duty trucks and SUVs.

Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson quickly noted that the eyes-off system, which builds off today’s Super Cruise hands-free driver-assist system, is not a Level 3 system on the SAE’s levels of driving automation. Anderson said, “We are not developing L3 autonomy.” According to Anderson, Level 3 was a convenient plug that made SAE’s levels “look like a continuous spectrum. It’s not. There’s a valley, and we are skipping over the valley.”

He continued by saying GM is developing autonomy that doesn’t require your attention and then will expand beyond the highway. While the official name of the upcoming system that will be eyes-off wasn’t divulged, Anderson said “Mission Mode” will be the expansion into off-highway autonomy. The future system will handle tedious tasks like getting laundry or picking up groceries without you even in it, according to Anderson.

Head of Human Interface Design Sebastian Bauer noted that these systems will “save you time” because drivers won’t need to pay attention to the road. “With more time, more freedom, more space in your day, what will you do?” Bauer asked.

GM noted, “Our vision is to build vehicles that can drive themselves or their occupants anywhere they need to be.”

That’s a long-term goal. To get there, GM’s working with thousands of current customers who have opted into and volunteered to share their data to support GM’s autonomous driving program. The data is helping to create models for the system to learn from. Currently, GM has its test stacks driving more than three billion virtual miles every day. A single vehicle running 24 hours a day seven days a week at an average of 50 mph would only cover about 1,200 miles a day, which means it would take roughly 2.5 million vehicles to match the current testing output, according to GM.

Notably, GM hasn’t said what all of this will cost the end user to buy or use. In a subscription-rich era where automakers are data-hungry, it’s hard to imagine there’s no cost associated with this system.

To date, Super Cruise has driven hands-free over 1.2 billion miles across nearly 750,000 vehicles.

The end goal of all this is about “making trusted autonomy available to everyday drivers,” according to GM.

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