While Ford has largely shifted its autonomous focus away from Level 4 and 5 as of late, The Blue Oval's CEO - Jim Farley - recently revealed that the company is close to achieving Level 3 autonomy, at least. However, Farley also admitted that it will be a while before we see such tech in production vehicles, while one of its rivals - Stellantis - opted to ditch its L3 ambitions altogether recently. That isn't the case with Ford's cross-town rival, General Motors, however.
According to GM Authority, that automaker has now announced that it will bring "eyes off" autonomous driving technology to market in 2028, starting with the all-electric Cadillac Escalade IQ. That software will represent an evolution of the existing BlueCruise rival, Super Cruise, which was developed in conjunction with engineers from the now-defunct self-driving robotaxi outfit Cruise.
GM's new eyes off autonomous driving feature will utilize a variety of hardware and software to function without the need for drivers to keep their eyes on the road, which is currently the case with BlueCruise and Super Cruise - lidar, radar, and cameras. Regardless, even though drivers will be able to do things like read a book or watch TV/movies while driving with this feature activated, they must still be ready to take over if the system deems such a thing necessary.
To make this happen, the Escalade IQ will be getting a new centralized computing platform with "10 times more over-the-air software update capacity, 1,000 times more bandwidth, and up to 35 times more AI performance for autonomy," according to GM.
It's similar to what we're seeing with the latest version of BlueCruise - 1.5 - which is only currently available in the 2025 Ford Mustang Mach-E, due to hardware limitations in prior models, meaning that it can't be retrofitted. It features a host of improvements over previous versions - including Automatic Lane Change - but can't be operated "eyes off," at least, not yet.
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