
The Scene
A 12-hour journey in a Cadillac Escalade, equipped with General Motors’ hands-free driving technology, changes what it means to go on a long family road trip, and puts transportation in a long-promised and long-delayed new era.
It’s a surprising takeaway given GM ditched plans to develop a full self-driving taxi business under Cruise Automation, a company it acquired in 2016. In December, California regulators revoked its license to operate following an incident in which a pedestrian was dragged by a robotaxi. Cruise’s remaining employees now work on improving Super Cruise, the autonomous driving technology in the Escalade, and other “advanced driver assist system” efforts at the company.
Bay Area residents are already used to autonomous vehicles, with Google’s driverless Waymo taxis ferrying passengers everywhere in the city. But a road trip along I-80 was a different proposition. I decided to test out the Super Cruise feature, risking marital discord by using my wife and two kids as guinea pigs during our annual President’s Day ski trip last week.
We made the 766-mile journey in a GM-supplied Cadillac Escalade V-series, a $160,000 SUV with a supercharged V-8 engine with a delightful growl. (At every gas station, at least one man complimented me on my fine taste in cars). As soon as we got on the freeway, I hit a button that caused the top of the steering wheel to glow green, letting me know that the car was taking over.
I was still technically responsible for everything the car did and had to be ready to take over at any point — a key requirement that makes it legal in all 50 states. An eye-tracking camera located near the top of the windshield and infrared lights built into the steering wheel kept me from looking away from the road for more than five seconds.
After five seconds, a green light on the steering wheel would start blinking, putting me on notice that it was time to pay attention. If I didn’t snap my gaze back on the road ahead, I’d feel an abrupt vibration in my seat, giving me a haptic warning that I needed to take back control of the car.
There are a lot of similar systems on the road today, but only a small handful allow hands-free operation. Even Teslas require drivers to hold onto the wheel. That small difference is, surprisingly, a game changer on a long drive, leaving you able to relax in comfortable positions. By the end, my techno-skeptical wife was converted and now wants a new car that is as close to autonomous as we can get.
In this article:
Know More
When we hit the mountains, Super Cruise stopped working, telling me it had no information about the road we were on.
There’s a reason Super Cruise hasn’t experienced any major incidents like the horrific crashes that were associated with Tesla’s Autopilot (The Cruise accident with a pedestrian was the self-driving taxi service with no driver.) It is abundantly cautious.
To ensure Super Cruise is safe, GM only allows it to operate on roads that it has meticulously mapped beforehand. Since 2018, it has tripled the amount of road where it can operate, to 750,000 miles.
With an outside company using LiDAR to constantly re-map the roads, Super Cruise cars, equipped with high precision GPS, have a lot more than just camera footage to help them accurately navigate the terrain and predict trouble. GM recommends not using Super Cruise in unpredictable driving conditions or in adverse weather.
Once we descended the Sierra range, we were in ideal Super Cruise country — a straight, largely flat road in an endless and barren landscape with little traffic. This is probably not as big of an advantage on more urban roads.
I do the majority of the driving in the family and when my wife drives, she does not enjoy it. After the three hours from our house to Lake Tahoe, for instance, she’s completely drained. But after we passed Reno, she got behind the wheel and stayed there almost all the way to Salt Lake City and said she felt surprisingly great when she was done driving.
The biggest surprise was that she had gone significantly faster. Without using adaptive cruise control that we have in our Subaru Outback, she tends to slow down at times, following behind slower traffic rather than maintaining a steady pace. Super Cruise doesn’t just maintain its speed, it automatically changes lanes to pass slower traffic, shaving tiny bits of time that add up on a long drive.
For instance, on the way back from Utah, Google Maps estimated the drive would take about 12 hours. We made that time despite traveling at the speed limit and stopping six times along the way with our two kids. We had expected our door-to-door time to take about two hours longer.

Reed’s view
Our 10-year-old Subaru Outback handles winter conditions like Lindsey Vonn, and its EyeSight adaptive cruise control system is a godsend on long drives, but the same trip to Utah a few years ago still left me feeling drained.
Since then, I’ve wondered: Could new technology make the journey feel less like a Griswolds road trip and more like a ride on the Orient Express? And it almost did.
But it’s still a 12-hour period where you can’t get a lot done. The next challenge for the auto industry is making autonomous driving systems so good that it’s safe on some stretches for drivers to take their eyes off the road.
Why we aren’t there already is a bit of a head scratcher when GM’s technology was good enough to offer customers taxi rides around San Francisco without a person in the driver’s seat.
Consumer vehicles are a different kind of challenge. Components need to be mass-produced at reasonable prices, with incredible levels of reliability. And car companies can’t sell ADAS systems that only work in one city. Targeting highways, which require fewer complex decisions, makes sense. But the consequences of a computer glitch while traveling at 75mph are high. Tesla drivers who put too much trust in the technology (ignoring or circumventing safety measures) have paid with their lives.
Complicating the matter is the AI revolution of the last few years. Systems like Super Cruise are guided by a mish mash of software that is inflexible by design. As much as possible, the company has tried to make the car drive as if it’s on digital rails. There’s no chance that it will hallucinate and suddenly decide to drive into oncoming traffic — although it did make some mistakes along our route that required corrective action.
But some autonomous driving companies are implementing AI models that work using the same type of architecture that powers ChatGPT — known as transformers. Google, for instance, has experimented with using its Gemini AI models to operate its Waymo driverless taxis.
The autonomous trucking company Waabi uses generative AI models inside a photorealistic simulation of the real world for its training.
Adam Rodriguez, who leads product for GM’s ADAS systems, said the company has also been experimenting with transformer architectures.
The upcoming version 14 of Tesla’s Full Self-Driving software is rumored to employ a transformer architecture. If it works, it could upend the autonomous driving race and give Tesla an even bigger head start. Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the company will begin offering a driverless Taxi service in Texas and recently began the regulatory process for one in California. (Musk’s timelines are at best a guestimate of what’s to come).
If transformers are the future, Tesla would have another advantage. Transformer-based foundation models require massive amounts of compute power and data, and Musk also controls xAI, which has the world’s largest cluster of AI chips and just released a frontier model that competes with the best in the world.
But unless AI breakthroughs suddenly accelerate, which is always possible, it’s likely it will take years before foundation models are reliable enough to operate cars without human supervision on any roadway (known as Level 5 autonomy).
There may be an interim period where the most advanced AI is not necessarily the best consumer experience. That opens up an opportunity for GM and other automakers to be the first to sell cars that reach what’s often called “level 4” autonomy, allowing drivers to take a nap or work on a laptop while the car is moving.
And if that happens, I may not be the only person who wants to drive 766 miles instead of taking a two-hour flight.

Notable
- The blog Not a Tesla App says it was briefed by the electric carmaker on what is coming in the next version of Full Self Driving and it sounds like the company is leaning more heavily toward transformer-based architecture.