Eyes-Off
GM’s Super Cruise Level 2 system has been a quiet success for nearly a decade, in stark contrast to Tesla’s frenzied, incessant updates of its Autopilot and so-called Full Self-Driving systems, which have been plagued by accidents, government probes, and plenty of abuse immortalized in Youtube videos.
The General’s Level 2 Super Cruise system, which arrived in 2017, has seen far fewer mentions in the press while quietly picking up accolades from industry observers and publications.
Now, General Motors says that it’s getting ready to take the next step with plans to launch an SAE Level 3 eyes-off, hands-off system in the Escalade iQ starting in 2028 that will permit drivers to divert their attention from the road for prolonged periods.
Just how wide of a rollout can we expect?
GM says Super Cruise users have covered some 700 million miles over 600,000 miles of mapped roads in the US, hinting at a likely starting point for its network of roads ready for SAE Level 3 driving.
GM’s Cruise robotaxi unit, which closed in late 2023, was also helpful in developing the planned upgrade to Super Cruise, with data, experience, and personnel having been folded into the Level 3 project.
“This combination of technology, scale, a decade of real-world deployment experience, and safety systems developed and tested for Super Cruise gives us the foundation to deliver the next phase of personal autonomy,” GM noted.
Therefore, if all goes according to schedule, the journey from Level 2 to Level 3 will have taken GM about a decade.
But there are still plenty of unknowns about a nationwide Level 3 system, even one that could be confined to the current reach of Level 2 Super Cruise.
To be sure, the system’s rollout in the Escalade iQ will be a limited one by definition — not all GM Super Cruise models that will suddenly receive it via an over-the-air update. So, not all Cadillac owners will wake up one day and be able to text or watch TV on the way to work.
More importantly, GM’s rollout of Level 3 tech will also depend quite a bit on whether federal and state regulators permit it to happen.
As we have seen with Mercedes’ Drive Pilot — to date the sole Level 3 system permitted in just two US states — far from all jurisdictions are on board. This means a nationwide rollout of GM’s Level 3 system might still require a single national standard to materialize in the next three years, or some critical mass of states will have to join California and Nevada in this experiment.
When it comes to usability, much will also depend on GM’s ability to engineer a system that will produce safe and repeatable transfers of control back to the driver when the road situation calls for it.
At first blush, such a transfer of control merely sounds like a version of Super Cruise disengagement, but in the case of a Level 3 system it will still require a cushion of a few seconds to safely turn control back to the driver. This is something that the autonomous industry has struggled to achieve on a safe and repeatable basis.
Another factor in the safe operation of a Level 3 system will be the sensors’ ability to deal with changing light and weather conditions at greater distances than Level 2 systems. Like other serious players in the autonomous industry, GM plans to rely on Lidar as part of its sensor suite, which is something that Tesla has famously jeered in developing its ambitiously-named Full Self-Driving, eventually opting for a camera-only approach. (This is also why Tesla’s FSD is bound to remain purely an SAE Level 2 system).
If there is one other factor to consider as we get closer to 2028, it’s the pricing of such a system for consumers. After all, such systems will eventually have to make business sense to automakers in the long run, if not at first. GM’s appetite for very advanced systems deployed on a limited scale isn’t finite, as we have seen in the past, and its planned Level 3 system might have to achieve a certain critical mass at launch that would be acceptable to the automaker.
For now, it’s clear that GM and other hopefuls in the Level 3 sphere have their work cut out for them.
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December 5, 2025
Peter Hughes
December 5, 2025
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