GM’s Super Cruise Could Revolutionize Long Road Trips and Crappy Commutes Alike

The 1950s were a golden age for General Motors (GM) and a time when road tripping was booming in popularity.

Back then, GM had technology in its cars with whimsical space-age names like Hydra-Matic, Dynaglow, Jetaway, and Powerglide that all sounded like science fiction. Keeping with tradition, today’s wonderfully named Super Cruise also sounds like it could take you to space. If the public back then knew about it, however, they might have assumed hands-free driving was something from the Twilight Zone and not a feature that might revolutionize road tripping.

What is Super Cruise?

Super Cruise launched in 2017 as the world’s first true semi-autonomous hands-free adaptive cruise control system. Even today, most similar systems require drivers to keep their hands on the wheel at all times, so Super Cruise was (and still is) wildly innovative. It uses a combination of light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensors, GPS mapping, and more to keep a vehicle centred in its lane of travel, maintain a safe distance from preceding traffic, steer, brake, and more. Driver attention monitoring ensures the user is paying attention and ready to take over when needed.

Super Cruise can be used on more than 960,000 km of compatible divided highways in Canada and the United States, and it’s now offered on 23 GM vehicles from affordable electric ones like the Chevrolet Bolt all the way up to the most luxurious Cadillac Escalade. Super Cruise can even be used while towing a trailer (which is an industry exclusive), can handle highway interchanges, pass a slower-moving vehicle then return to the correct lane, and make room for merging vehicles, all without driver intervention or hands on the steering wheel.

To celebrate more than 1.6 billion miles driven using Super Cruise, a convoy of GM vehicles with the tech embarked on a coast-to-coast drive across Canada from Victoria, B.C., to St. John’s, N.L. There’s no better way to celebrate this Canadian success story — GM’s technical centre in Markham, Ont., played a vital role in engineering, developing, and testing Super Cruise — than seeing what this beautiful country is all about.

The Journey Begins: Winnipeg to Thunder Bay

Setting off on the fourth leg of the journey from Winnipeg to Toronto in a Buick Enclave, we had more than 2,100 km to cover over three days. That’s a daunting amount of driving. My family and I had driven in the opposite direction when I was a kid, and all my parents could recall from that trip was how exhausting and tedious it was. However, we didn’t have Super Cruise back then.

Plugging the destination to our first overnight stop in Thunder Bay, Ont., into the built-in Google interface, Google Maps showed that Super Cruise was available for the majority of the 700 km-plus route. Of the seven-hour and 34-minute estimated trip time, seven hours and three minutes could be spent with no hands on the wheel.

We cruised our way to the longitudinal centre of Canada in Manitoba, saw some black bears along the Trans-Canada Highway, and crossed into Ontario where we saw Husky the Muskie in Kenora, admired Big Foot in Vermilion Bay, Ont., posed by Max the Moose in Dryden, and visited Kakabeka Falls in Kenora. The 7,800-km route across the country is peppered with small towns that host must-see monumental natural landmarks and famous quirky roadside attractions.

When we encountered other vehicles on our cross-country convoy, we’d give the “Super Cruise wave,” which is just two hands up high doing spirit fingers simply because we could.

My co-driver had never used Super Cruise before and said he didn’t really trust it when we began our journey. After activating Super Cruise and awkwardly hovering his hands around the steering wheel, it took less than 15 minutes before he had both hands off the wheel, comfortably holding a bag of Cheetos and shovelling them into his mouth. He said the system does a great job of communicating with the driver so they know what’s happening at all times, which is what earned his trust.

If it was passing a slower vehicle, it would turn on the left signal, vibrate the left side of the driver’s seat, show a graphic in the driver’s display explaining that it was looking for a safe entry, and then alert the driver when the manoeuvre was completed. The system is intuitive to use and makes it hard to stay skeptical.

With Super Cruise able to take care of the energy-draining tedium of such a long drive, we arrived in Thunder Bay tired, but not dead-on-arrival exhausted as we have after similar long slogs of driving without Super Cruise. Even after Day One, it was obvious that Super Cruise is a game-changer for road trippers. We slept like babies and got energized for Day Two.

Day Two and Three: Thunder Bay to Sault Ste. Marie to Toronto

After a quick stop at The Persian Man in Thunder Bay for a dozen of its famous doughnuts with pink frosting and a cinnamon swirl, we hit the road to find the Terry Fox monument marking the spot where the Canadian icon had to end his Marathon of Hope. We Super Cruise’d our way to Canada’s longest suspension bridge in Dorion, another lesson about trust in engineering.

The 600-foot (183-metre) bridge overlooks Eagle Canyon, a gorge carved out centuries ago by glacial meltwater, which is one of many reminders of Canada’s stunning natural beauty. While it’s unsettling how the bridge sways and you look down into a rocky abyss, you learn to trust the engineering. It’s sort of like how Super Cruise sometimes feels like it’s barrelling into a bend on the highway that you wish it would slow down for, but it always manages to stay in control and get you through safely.

Super Cruise enabled me to enjoy a doughnut with both hands on the way to the Augasabon River Gorge, before we stopped briefly in Rossport’s Nipigon Bay to take in the majesty of the Canadian Shield. Our next stop was White River, the birthplace of the real bear cub that inspired Winnie the Pooh (fun fact: Winnie is named after Winnipeg). En route to Wawa to see the famous giant goose landmark, we spotted a moose enjoying some shade beside the highway.

Heading out from an overnight stay in “the Soo,” we stopped in Echo Bay to admire the giant Loonie that commemorates the artist responsible for the design of this famous coin that debuted in 1987, Robert R. Carmichael, who lived there. Northern Ontario loves big coins, and we made sure to stop at the Big Nickel in Sudbury, which, at nine metres tall, holds the title of the world’s biggest coin. Surprisingly, the parking lot was full of tourists with campers lining up to see this novelty-sized monument to Sudbury’s mining industry, erected in 1964.

Final Thoughts

A Super Cruise journey across Canada was a fantastic way to see the country, but it likely also generated a lot of useful data for GM to continue improving the technology in real time. Super Cruise is continually being updated, and all of this helps GM move towards its goal of being the first automaker to offer “eyes-off” capability for the next generation of Super Cruise in 2028. This evolution of Super Cruise would allow a driver to read books or watch movies while driving, another game-changer for road trippers or people with awful, energy-draining commutes. Eventually, GM hopes to expand Super Cruise to be compatible on all roads — not just divided highways.

Reza Zarringhalam, Principal Engineer at GM’s Canadian Technical Centre in Markham, Ont., sums it up best. This is a dream project for him. Super Cruise is “about solving a complex problem that creates massive value for humanity,” he said, adding that it’s so fulfilling for him to work on because he’s helping people have more control over a priceless, finite resource.

“Everyone wants more time. We spend so much time driving — if we can give that time back, that’s a huge value.”

Road trips are my favourite way to travel. I always enjoy time on the road, but long slogs of highway travel can be boring and potentially unsafe if drivers let their fatigue get the best of them. Without a Twilight Zone-like teleportation machine called TravelMatic, TimeGlide, or something else charmingly retro, Super Cruise is the next best thing because it makes the time spent on long drives more effortless to manage, freeing up valuable brain power and ensuring you’re not too travel-weary to take in all the sights and conversations along the way.