While many cars today alert you to help ensure your eyes stay on the highway in front of you, General Motors has unveiled a new “eyes-off” self-driving feature that will encourage the opposite.
Arriving in 2028, GM said the new eyes-off driving will be offered in its Cadillac Escalade IQ, an electric SUV, during highway driving. GM said that as long as there’s turquoise lighting on the dashboard and outside mirrors signaling the system is working, drivers can read or go through their inboxes “while the vehicle handles the drive.”
The upcoming feature is part of GM’s roadmap to autonomous driving, which CEO Mary Barra outlined at a Wednesday event in New York.
While the eyes-off feature will be limited to highways when it arrives, Barra described GM’s vision for a fully autonomous future.
“Let’s fast forward a few years. Imagine you step into your vehicle, you push a button, and it drives you to the office. You catch up on work, send emails, or watch an episode of your favorite show,” Barra said at the GM Forward event.
“The car drops you off, and it notices it’s time for a break inspection, and heads to the dealership,” Barra said. “Then it goes to get your dry cleaning, take out for dinner, and it comes back in time so you can drive your kids to their soccer game.”
General Motors
Chief Product Officer Sterling Anderson said at the event that GM is starting with eyes-off driving on the highway “because that’s where autonomous technology delivers the greatest immediate impact.” Commuters, he said, spend on average five hours each week doing “monotonous driving.”
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GM also said that drivers will be able to chat with AI as soon as next year, when the company integrates Google Gemini into its vehicles. Drivers can send messages and plan detailed routes by talking to the AI, and the company plans to integrate its own custom AI system into its vehicles, which will give information on things like maintenance needs and the best routes.
The future system could, for example, coach a driver through parallel parking, queue up an audiobook, or flag an unusual vibration and give directions to a nearby servicing center, senior vice president of software engineering David Richardson said.
GM’s announcement comes on the heels of better-than-expected earnings on Tuesday. The stock for the country’s biggest automaker is up more than 24% year-to-date as of mid-morning on Wednesday.
GM’s eyes-off technology relies on Light Detection and Ranging, or LiDAR, a sensor that scans a vehicle’s environment with laser beams and measures the time it takes to get a return signal. Waymo’s robotaxis use LiDAR, but Tesla’s vehicles don’t. Instead, Tesla uses a vision-only system that relies solely on cameras. Elon Musk has repeatedly criticized LiDAR, calling it unnecessary and expensive.
At the GM Forward event, the company also said its engineers are developing software for collaborative robots, or “cobots,” that are hitting the ground at assembly plants this year.
“These are robots designed to work side-by-side with people,” Anderson said, adding that, ideally, the cobots will eventually be able to “adapt to any role.”
