In the 1991 comedy What About Bob?, Bob Wiley (Bill Murray) is a fear-stricken adult bouncing from psychiatrist to psychiatrist. His newest doctor, Leo Marvin (Richard “I was in Jaws” Dreyfuss), gives Bob his newest book entitledBaby Steps. Wiley takes this seriously; hilarity ensues.
Baby steps are exactly what the automotive community is experiencing when it comes to fully automated cars. It started with cruise control in the early twentieth century and each baby step taken gets us closer and closer to fully autonomous motoring.
The newest baby step, though still in its infancy, is what GM calls Super Cruise (don’t confuse it with sustained, supersonic-level flight without afterburners). As expected, Super Cruise will make freeway driving autonomous. This makes sense because the controlled environment of a restricted-access road limits the variables: the cars are (hopefully) going the same direction and relative speeds between them are fairly similar. Super Cruise utilizes all the current safety systems (like lane-departure warning, collision prevention, blind-spot monitoring, and stability control) for real-time data. Other data collectors include cameras, GPS, radar, and ultrasonic sensors.
A myriad of sensors with 360 degrees of detection helped GM overcome what it says was the biggest hurdle: keeping a Super Cruise–equipped car in the middle of its lane. For example, GPS data can communicate upcoming curves in its path. Cameras and other sensors will spot people, lane markings, and pinpoint the relative location of other cars on the road.
Like Sex Panther, Super Cruise will work 100 percent of the time, some of the time. Rain and snow, for example, reduce the usefulness of some sensors to nil. If that is the case, the driver will have to take the helm. We’re not sure how the car will cope with switching from autonomous mode to driver-controlled, but we would suggest a warning that could not be ignored.
The hope is to have Super Cruise in production by the middle of this decade. A betting man would say this technology will roll out on the Cadillac XTS or a possible future Cadillac flagship, trickling down from there. This time frame does not seem completely unfeasible. Think about it: In the last decade, cars have started to automatically brake if an accident is imminent, detect and warn the driver about pedestrians, tell you when you’re sleepy, control spins, and warn of surrounding cars. Those are all fairly significant baby steps in a short amount of time.
