Hands Off With Cadillac’s Automated CT6 On Dallas’ Freeways

It is as terrifying as it is exhilarating to be cut off on eastbound Interstate 30 at 65-miles-per-hour when your hands are off the steering wheel. This 2018 Cadillac CT6 senses the white van a car-length or so ahead and confidently dips its speed to below 60, all the while curving the sedan to the left to maintain the lane as if it’s following along an invisible track. Feel free to grip the arm rest and enjoy the show.

The CT6’s so-called Super Cruise platform is Cadillac’s first dive into automation. First revealed in 2012, it’s now equipped in its top-line 2018 sedans and heading to dealers. And with Dallas-Fort Worth pairing with the feds to test self-driving cars on city streets and freeways, GM invited the magazine over to the Joule to try it out. It’s among the first iterations of commercialized self-driving systems, and differs from its closest competitors, Tesla and Mercedes-Benz. Those require the driver to check in by jostling the steering wheel; Cadillac uses strategically placed sensors that can tell whether the driver is looking away from the road. It isn’t fully automated, and it only works on the freeways. According to levels established by the Society of Automotive Engineers, this qualifies as a Level 2—in laymen terms, the driver can’t activate the software and doze off.

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It uses an infrared sensor to monitor both head and eye movements; although, the cameras cannot take photos or video, according to the brass giving the presentation yesterday. If you haven’t looked forward in a few seconds or are preoccupied with your phone, the steering wheel sensor blinks red, chirps, your seat vibrates, and you’ll need to grab on. If you don’t, it’ll slow to a stop with its hazards on and summon OnStar to check on you. But if you stare forward, you can cruise until it’s time to switch lanes, exit, or an obstacle appears that it’s not smart enough to overcome. There is plenty of time to take over if you’re approaching an object beyond the technology’s capabilities. Cadillac believes it has overcome the challenge of partial automation—keep the driver alert, but don’t make the safeguards such a pain that it kills the experience of the car driving itself. It calls the driver “a partner.”

“The onus is still on you as the driver,” said Cadillac’s marketing manager, Eric Angeloro.

Engineers have spent years mapping 160,000 miles of America and Canada’s divided highways—freeways with a median separating the two directions—and incorporating the data with military-grade GPS. The car knows where it is, and syncs its position with the mapping data of the highway. From there, just imagine you’re on a rail line you can’t see. It analyzes the road through three LIDAR sensors, which uses light to judge the distance of nearby objects, that are placed below either side mirror and the front windshield. The driver can set the car-lengths that they’re comfortable with, and the CT6 maintains that space. It brakes automatically, and works in stop-and-go traffic. It’s also great on the open road, automating up to 85 miles-per-hour. (I had it for about a half-hour, so I didn’t notice the kinks that CityLab reporter Linda Poon did on her 9-hour trip.)



Angeloro highlighted Super Cruise as a “driver convenience feature,” and, on a car that retails for nearly $85,000, that’s about the best way to put it. It feels like the beginning, a first dip into a new technology. It does drive smoothly, from the acceleration and braking to correction and steering.

The Cadillac clearly isn’t ready to take over driving completely, which makes it hard to imagine the dystopian future once imagined in a report by New York University’s Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management. It is much simpler to see uses that mirror the pilot in Arlington, one of 10 sites for a federal research project into automation.

The government hopes automation will eventually cut down on driving deaths. The Department of Transportation says that 94 percent of the 34,092 people who died on the roads in 2015 “can be tied to human choice or error.” One of the projects include a 10-mile managed lane on Interstate 30 between Fort Worth and Dallas. It’s not hard to see something like Super Cruise plotting the path and letting the vehicles go; these can even park themselves. The Arlington City Council also OK’d a $272,000 pilot that shuttles Rangers and Cowboys attendees from the parking lot to the stadiums in automated vans from the French company Easy Mile. Same idea: Map the path, and watch out for obstacles.

If those passengers are anything like me, it won’t take long to get comfortable with relinquishing (some) control. After heading east on I-30 onto 635, I let the car take over at 80 mph heading south on Central. It handled all the curves and 18-wheelers and rapidly-braking sedans that it came across below Lovers on the way back into downtown.