GM New Eyes Off System Lets AI Take the Wheel While You Doomscroll – Motors is unleashing another shot in the self-driving battles. In 2028, the manufacturer stated today, it will roll out what it’s dubbing a “eyes-off” driving system on the electrified Cadillac Escalade IQ. In effect, this means a driver navigating approved, plotted highways will be able to do practically anything they want behind the wheel.
Snack, answer emails, catch up with their shows, turn around to yell at the youngsters in the rear. Even sleep, maybe—provided that they wake up by the time they’ve reached the exit ramp. (If they don’t, the car will find a safe area to pull over, GM says.) GM New Eyes Off System Lets AI Take the Wheel While You Doomscroll
The new system marks a collaboration between the team responsible for General Motors’ eight-year-old Super Cruise, an advanced driver-assistance system that the automaker today described as “hands-free” on some highways, and Cruise, a robotaxi subsidiary that once competed with Waymo before GM cut off its funding in 2024. It might also put the Detroit manufacturer in contention with other automakers—Toyota and Tesla among them—who are aiming to deliver some kind of self-driving technologies to drivers’ independently owned automobiles.
Unlike Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system, which rely on cameras alone to make choices, GM’s new “eyes-off” capability will use lidar, radar, and cameras.
It will make it plain when the driver is needed to pay attention again using a mix of tactile, audio, and visual cues, says Sterling Anderson, the executive vice president of global product and chief product officer at GM. (He was a cofounder of the self-driving trucking business Aurora, and played a crucial part in designing Tesla’s Autopilot driver assistance system.) “If the last couple of decades have taught us anything, it’s that you can’t expect an inattentive driver to be prepared to take over at a moment’s notice. You simply can’t,” he says. GM New Eyes Off System Lets AI Take the Wheel While You Doomscroll
The “eyes-off” system release was one of a suite of AI-adjacent discoveries from GM on Wednesday, the latest evidence that manufacturers are set to fight on who can best fit the buzzy tech onto wheels. Next year, GM says, its vehicles will come with a Google Gemini chatbot interface that should be able to let drivers more organically request that their car help them, for example, navigate to a coffee shop near work.
At some time in the future, GM says, it will launch a custom-built AI that will maintain drivers’ specific preferences—their preferred driving music, temperature, or mirror position, perhaps—and might, for example, tell them when their car needs servicing. All this will be facilitated by a new centralized computing platform, also launching in 2028. The wing mirrors of the Escalade will light up blue to alert to people on the road that the EV is driving itself. GM New Eyes Off System Lets AI Take the Wheel While You Doomscroll
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