- GM wants to deploy a new generation of Super Cruise with eyes-off, hands-off capability.
- It will debut on a lidar-equipped Cadillac Escalade IQ in 2028.
- The automaker also plans to extend this capability to its combustion engine vehicles.
General Motors recorded $1.1 billion in charges linked to the rollback of its electric vehicle ambitions in the first quarter of this year, the automaker said in its Q1 2026 earnings call on Tuesday.
Against that backdrop, its Super Cruise advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) continued to be a bright spot, paving the path for higher levels of autonomy on both future GM EVs and combustion engine cars, company officials said.
GM customers have now driven more than a billion miles using Super Cruise, with subscriptions increasing 70% year-over-year. This vast data set comprising real-world driving miles will help GM roll out its Level 3 hands-off, eyes-off system on the Cadillac Escalade IQ in 2028, which will also get a LIDAR sensor.
“We’re stress testing it in a digital environment capable of simulating roughly 100 years of human driving every single day,” CEO Mary Barra said during the company earnings call on Tuesday. GM also recently started testing the system out on actual roads in California and Michigan.
Lidar-equipped Cadillac Escalade IQ at the GM Forward event last year.
Photo by: Patrick George
Automakers are treating autonomy as the next battleground alongside electrification. It may offer them something that their EV businesses still are struggling with: recurring, high-margin revenue. For GM, Super Cruise sits right at the center of that strategy.
“The way we’re building this technology is a reflection of how seriously we’re embracing AI across the enterprise,” she added. Nearly 90% of the code written by GM’s autonomy team is AI-generated, Barra claimed.
Super Cruise is already getting deployed across a growing number of GM vehicles, from Cadillacs to Chevys. While it comes as standard on some high-end models, buyers must still subscribe for around $40 per month or $400 annually after a trial period, which is usually three years.
Photo by: Patrick George
It still lags behind Tesla’s Full Self Driving (FSD) system in adoption and mileage. FSD now has 1.28 million active subscribers and nearly 10 billion miles logged in. Still, GM thinks Super Cruise can catch up and distinguish itself from its competitors.
“The Escalade IQ is just the start,” Barra said. “We are doing something unique in the autonomous space, which is developing a system for personal vehicles that we can deploy on both ICE vehicles and EVs and scale across multiple brands and price points.”
To make that happen, GM vehicles will likely need significant software and hardware upgrades. AI-based autonomy systems demand significant onboard computing power and advanced sensor stacks. That’s relatively straightforward on newer, software-defined EV platforms.
Extending the same capability across internal combustion vehicles, many of which weren’t designed with this level of compute in mind, is far trickier. GM has yet to fully explain how it plans to do that.
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