GM unveils Ultra Cruise for hands-free driving

A few weeks ago, I saw the new Cadillac Lyriq in person for the first time and asked the GM folks there if the Lyriq could have Ultra Cruise, making them look at me like I’m an alien. “Ultra Cruise? They said, seemingly unfamiliar with it, or pretending to be. So I made a clumsy joke and changed the subject. Flash forward to Wednesday and GM unveiled… Ultra Cruise.

It’s entirely possible that the folks at GM didn’t know Ultra Cruise would officially be, really a thing when I asked them about it in August, because when we first heard about it over a year ago now, “Ultra Cruise” was just an internal name. On Wednesday, however, GM said it would also be the real external name of the product, the next evolution of its semi-autonomous technology beyond Super Cruise.

The main difference between Super Cruise and Ultra Cruise seems to be that Ultra Cruise will cover more than highways in the United States and Canada, many of which are already compatible with Super Cruise. That means two million kilometers of roads, according to GM, and up to 3.4 million kilometers of roads later, or possibly “95% of driving scenarios.” Ultra Cruise users will be able to use it “on almost any road, including city streets, subdivision streets and cobblestone rural roads, in addition to highways.”

Big so true, as they say. An interesting thing here is that GM says it will reserve Ultra Cruise for its “premium” cars – Cadillac and, presumably, GMC – while Super Cruise will be for its “mainstream” cars, which are Chevrolets and, presumably, cars. Buick. Your semi-autonomous future with GM is only if you can afford it.

Here are other new features GM provided with Ultra Cruise:

Ultra Cruise is powered by a future-proof 5 nanometer scalable computing architecture through the Ultifi Software Platform and Vehicle Intelligence Platform. Ultra Cruise can add features, functions and services over time through frequent live updates.

Ultra Cruise builds on the capabilities of Super Cruise with new automated driving features designed to:

• Provide users with information based on their experience with the system through an all-new digital signage
• Respond to permanent traffic control systems
• Follow internal shipping routes
• Keep the direction ; obey the speed limit
• Support for automatic and on-demand lane change
• Supports left and right turns
• Support near object avoidance
• Support parking in residential driveways
• The system also offers full 360 degree perception around the vehicle.

Intelligent diagnostic and learning systems automatically identify scenarios where Ultra Cruise needs to be upgraded, triggering data logging in vehicles equipped with the service. These records will then be processed by GM’s back-office data ecosystem for continuous system improvement.

This last piece looks a lot like what Tesla does with fully autonomous driving, although I’m sure GM would say it’s totally different. Either way, Ultra Cruise does all of this with radar, LiDAR, and cameras, and will also have the driver attention camera that Super Cruise uses to make sure drivers’ eyes stay on the road. There is also something called the “man-machine interface”, “through which the system presents information to the driver and communicates when he needs to control the vehicle”. It looks like a screen and haptic or audio outputs or both.

GM says Ultra Cruise will arrive here in 2023, and I wonder how GM could name the next Cruise technology after Ultra. Hyper cruising? Or maybe at that time – towards the end of this decade, one imagines – GMs robotaxi Cruise project will be ready for prime time, and that will be evolution. No more Super or Ultra or Hyper because instead we finally did the whole robotaxi thing. It’s just Cruise now.