GM will introduce hands-free driving in 2028

General Motors said it plans to launch an automated driving system in 2028 that will allow drivers to take their eyes off the road and their hands off the wheel, starting with the Cadillac Escalade IQ.

The announcement, made Wednesday at the GM Forward event in New York City, comes a year after TechCrunch first reported that the automaker was working on the system.

GM said its advanced driver assistance system, known as Super Cruise, is the foundation of this more capable future product. Super Cruise, which was launched in 2017 and is now available on 23 vehicle models, can be used on about 600,000 highway miles.

This new driver assistance system, which will use lidar, radar and camera technology for perception, will also start on highways. GM CEO Mary Barra indicated during the event that GM will roll out its off-road product faster than it did with the Super Cruise ADAS system.

The automaker said it tapped the expertise of engineers who worked at the now-shuttered autonomous vehicle technology company Cruise to improve the system’s capabilities. When GM shuttered Cruise, its commercial taxi business, in December 2024, it absorbed the subsidiary and combined it with its own efforts to develop driver-assistance features. Over the past year, GM has also rehired several cruise engineers as it pursues its goal of developing fully self-driving personal vehicles.

GM said it is also feeding Cruise’s technology suite, which includes AI models trained on five million driverless miles and a simulation framework that runs virtual test scenarios, into its next-generation driver-assistance and self-driving software.

“Using Robotaxi as a proof of concept at startup makes a lot of sense,” Sterling Anderson, executive vice president of global products at GM and former co-founder of autonomous vehicle startup Aurora Innovation, said during the event, adding that the high cost of sensors and computing on autonomous vehicles requires high utilization of those vehicles.

“We are now in 2025 in a situation where the industry has broadly succeeded in dramatically reducing the cost of some devices,” Anderson said. “Uniquely, General Motors has the installation base and manufacturing capacity to produce these products in much larger quantities and at much lower costs. If the industry had had low-cost systems and a large installation base and manufacturing capacity to begin with, we probably would have all been moving toward personal, self-driving vehicles from the beginning.”

In the United States, Mercedes is currently the only automaker with a commercially available hands-free system. Such systems fall under SAE’s Level 3 automation, which refers to an automated system that can drive itself under certain conditions but may still require a human to take over. Mercedes Drive Pilot is only available on certain highways in California and Nevada, and only works in heavy, low-speed traffic.

GM’s low-profile product will work on highways that GM has not specified, according to Paris Cetinok, GM’s senior vice president of software and services. He added that the system would only require human grabs on objects such as ramps, and could handle sudden emergencies and accidents.

“Human intervention should not be the escape door for sudden accidents,” Cetinuk said.

Getting to market with a hands-off drive system would put GM ahead of most other automakers, unless they got there first. Earlier this year, Stellantis unveiled its Level 3 system, but halted the launch. Tesla has been seeking to “solve the problem of full self-driving” by relying solely on its cars’ cameras and neural networks for years, although its Autopilot and FSD systems still require the driver to keep his eyes on the road.