General Motors said it plans to launch an autonomous driving system in 2028 that allows drivers to take their eyes off the road and hands off the wheel, starting with the Cadillac Escalade IQ.
The announcement was made Wednesday at the GM Forward event in New York City, a year after TechCrunch first reported that the automaker was working on the system.
GM said its hands-off advanced driver assistance system, known as Super Cruise, is the foundation of this future, more capable product. Super Cruise, which was released in 2017 and currently has 23 models in its lineup, can drive approximately 600,000 miles on highways.
This new eye-less driver assistance system, which uses lidar, radar and cameras for recognition, will also be introduced on highways. GM CEO Mary Barra said during the event that GM will deploy eye-off products faster than hands-off Super Cruise ADAS.
The company said it leveraged the experience of engineers who worked at its now-shuttered self-driving technology subsidiary Cruise to improve the functionality of its systems. When GM shut down its commercial robotaxi business, Cruise, in December 2024, it merged the subsidiary with its own efforts to develop driver-assistance features. GM rehired several cruise engineers last year to pursue its goal of developing fully autonomous personal vehicles.
GM also said it is incorporating Cruise’s technology stack, including AI models trained on 5 million miles of driverless driving and a simulation framework that runs virtual test scenarios, into its next-generation driver assistance and autonomous driving programs.
“It makes a lot of sense to do robotaxis as an initial proof of concept,” Sterling Anderson, GM’s executive vice president of global products and former co-founder of AV startup Aurora Innovation, said during the event, adding that the high cost of sensors and computing for self-driving cars necessitates high utilization of self-driving cars.
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“In 2025, the entire industry is in a position to significantly reduce the cost of some hardware,” Anderson said. “And GM uniquely has the installed base and manufacturing capacity to sell these in much higher volumes and at a much lower cost. If the industry had low-cost systems and a huge installed base and manufacturing capacity to begin with, we probably all would have chosen personal self-driving cars to begin with.”
Mercedes is currently the only automaker in the United States to offer a hands-off/eyes-off system. Such systems fall under SAE Automation Level 3. This refers to automated systems that can drive themselves under certain conditions, but still require human handover. Mercedes’ Drive Pilot is only available on certain mapped highways in California and Nevada, and only works when traffic is heavy and slow.
GM’s Eyes Off product also works on highways that GM doesn’t map, said Baris Setinok, GM’s senior vice president of software and services. He added that the system only requires human handover in cases such as exit ramps, and can also handle emergencies and sudden incidents.
“Human intervention should not be a refuge for sudden events,” Chetinok says.
Bringing a hands-off driving system to market will put GM ahead of most other automakers unless it does it first. Earlier this year, Stellantis announced its own Level 3 system, but its release was put on hold. Tesla has been aiming for a “full self-driving solution” for years, relying solely on the car’s cameras and neural networks, even though its Autopilot and FSD systems still require drivers to keep their eyes on the road.
