Cadillac is developing a semi-autonomous driving technology called "Super Cruise" that could be on the road by the middle of this decade, General Motors said Friday.
In certain "optimal" conditions, the car would take over and drive itself. It relies on a combination of front and rear radar, plus GPS and lane-centering technology, General Motors said.
Many of the technologies needed to build a self-driving car already exist within the 2013 Cadillac XTS and ATS sedans, the automaker said. They include systems like Cadillac's rear automatic braking, full-speed adaptive cruise control, brake assist, collision alert and preparation, lane departure warning, blind zone alert, cross traffic alert, rear vision, and heads-up display.
"Super Cruise has the potential to improve driver performance and enjoyment," said Don Butler, vice president of Cadillac marketing, in a statement. "Our goal with advanced technologies, like this and our CUE system, is to lead in delivering an intuitive user experience."
The key to delivering semi-autonomous capability will be the integration of lane- centering technology that relies on forward-looking cameras to detect lane markings and GPS map data to detect curves and other road characteristics, said John Capp, General Motors director of Global Active Safety Electronics and Innovation, in a statement. GM acknowledged that in certain cases, the car may not be able to reliably drive itself, based on a lack of data. In that case, the user will have to steer.
GM's vision of a future semi-autonomous Cadillac is consistent with other automakers, such as Ford, which has indicated that it too is looking to slowly evolve its current technologies into an autonomous vehicle.
"We definitely are looking at the impact that autonomous vehicles will have in the future," Jim Buczkowski, the director of electrical and electronics systems at Ford Research and Innovation, and a Henry Ford Technical Fellow, said in a March interview with PCMag. "It's going to come in stages, and it's very logical to see how conditions like freeway driving will be the first place to see that kind of stuff. So the interesting thing about the effort toward autonomous driving is the knowledge that we're building and creating the processing of information, the fusing of sensor information and so on."
Moving toward the concept of an autonomous vehicle is "a journey, and along the way there's a lot of spinoffs on how we can use the technology to augment and improve some of the systems we have today," Buczkowski added.
Google, of course, has taken a different route, with a self-driving car based on the Toyota Prius platform. It uses a rotating laser sensor from Velodyne, which may be used in a security system as well.
Legislators in Nevada recently approved its Department of Transportation to approve rules for self-driving cars, and a state senator from California has also proposed a bill to start the process in the Golden State as well.
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