General Motors plans eyes-off driving for nearly its whole lineup

General Motors plans to expand hands-off, eyes-off Super Cruise to nearly every vehicle in its lineup, including pickups and crossovers. The announcement at its Forward event broadens a plan announced last year for the Escalade IQ, according to Ars Technica’s October 22 report.

GM also announced an OnStar AI assistant and a fourth-generation electric-vehicle architecture. Together, the plans cover how vehicles drive, help their occupants and store energy—not capabilities confirmed as available across the lineup.

Testing eyes-off driving

The planned Super Cruise expansion would let drivers take their hands off the wheel and their eyes off the road. Sterling Anderson, GM’s head of product, said testing totals 1 million miles (1.6 million km) a month across virtual and real-world driving combined. That figure is GM’s account of testing activity, not an independent measure of performance.

GM is also developing fully autonomous driving. Rashed Haq, its vice president of autonomous vehicles, told Ars that readiness depends on safety and “roadcraft”—making sure a vehicle does not create hazards or disrupt other traffic. He said GM expects to bear responsibility if a malfunction causes something to go wrong while the computer is driving.

Rollout dates, individual-model eligibility and independently measured performance remain unspecified.

An assistant built around the vehicle

GM says OnStar AI would learn drivers’ habits and answer questions about their vehicles. For example, a driver who hears an unexplained beep could ask the assistant what triggered it. Anderson also described a hypothetical restaurant suggestion and takeout order based on a driver’s preferences; he was outlining a possible use, not reporting a demonstration.

Onboard computing announced at last year’s Forward event is intended to handle much of the processing inside the vehicle, without a cloud connection. GM also says its forthcoming infotainment system would record camera footage and allow cloud uploads protected by end-to-end encryption. Under that design, GM says it could not read the stored video or decrypt it for law enforcement.

Those privacy promises follow an earlier practice described by Ars: GM sold customer data to insurance companies, often without customers’ knowledge.

A battery plan aimed at lower costs

GM’s Gen-4 electric-vehicle architecture would use lithium manganese-rich batteries. GM’s proposition is that this chemistry can store nearly as much energy for a given size or weight as nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries, without expensive cobalt, at costs closer to lithium iron phosphate cells.

GM’s stated battery-cost reduction is 30 percent. Ars suggests that cheaper batteries could help the company offer a wider electric-vehicle range, potentially including more affordable models; that is a possible consequence, not an announced vehicle price.