Cadillac Super Cruises to the front with the most advanced semi-autonomous car on the market

Video shot and edited by Jennifer Hahn. (video link)

NEW YORK—As regular readers of Cars Technica know, the auto industry is going full-speed ahead when it comes to self-driving cars. A number of OEMs and their technology company partners have promised us SAE "level 4" self driving vehicles by 2021. But not all of these organizations are taking the same road to get there. Some, like Ford and Volvo, have decided to go straight to full autonomy by working on vehicles that won't need a human driver at all within specific geofenced areas (these are vehicles that you or I will use through ride-hailing services). Others, notably General Motors and Audi, believe in some degree of returning control to the human driver, who may or may not be giving the road their full attention. At this year's New York International Auto Show, the former group broke cover with its new Super Cruise system, which will be available on the Cadillac CT6 sedan later this year.

To be accurate, unlike the system due to appear in Audi's next A8 flagship, Super Cruise is only a level 2, not level 3, autonomy. There are already plenty of level 2 autonomous systems on the market already, typically cars with a combination of adaptive cruise control—which maintains a car's speed to traffic ahead via the use of radar—and a lane keeping assist that reads the lane markers on the road with an optical sensor and steers to keep the car centered between them. But Super Cruise is closer to level 3 than pretty much every other level 2 system out there, since it combines adaptive cruise control and lane keeping with two notable advances that are going to play a large role in more autonomous cars in the future.

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