GM’s “Ultra Cruise” Hands-Free Driving Technology Moves Into City Streets

• It is based on GM’s Super Cruise, currently limited to highway driving.

• “Ultra Cruise” integrates near-autonomous city driving.

• There are no known official launch dates for the moment.

Autonomous driving technology is still a hot topic in these times inundated with stories about the pandemic and its effects on the industry and the world at large. While Tesla’s making headlines for increasing the price of its Full Self Driving feature of its Autopilot technology by about $1,000 as of July 1^st, GM’s is hard at work developing “Ultra Cruise” designed to navigate city streets autonomously, or nearly, with minimal driver input.

Car and Driver reports that Doug Parks, GM executive vice president of global product development, brought up this topic during a phone conversation that took place during Citi’s 2020 Car of the Future Symposium. GM’s Cadillac brand launched Super Cruise back in 2017 with the then-new 2018 Cadillac CT6.

“Ultra Cruise” is the next phase of Super Cruise as it will be engineered to “drive” the car through cities, neighborhoods, and other non-wide-open spaces. GM is careful about claiming that this will render the car in which it is installed fully-autonomous. Parks said: We’re not saying Ultra Cruise will be fully autonomous 100 percent of the time, although that could be one of the endgames for Ultra Cruise.”