I was a self-driving skeptic until I tried GM’s Super Cruise

I recently went on a vacation that included a seven-hour drive each way, so I decided it would be a great time to test out some self-driving tech, like GM’s Super Cruise system, and I was not disappointed.

I’ve made this trip up to Timmins, Ontario, from Toronto before, and while it’s a pretty nice drive, it can get tiring by the end, especially on the way home when the last leg of the drive takes me through Toronto’s highways. I was hoping that Super Cruise would make me less tired on that drive, and it did, which really surprised me.

How Super Crusie works

The system uses real-time cameras, sensors, GPS, and LiDAR map data to detect curves in the road and stay between the lines. It also partly piggybacks off of GM’s adaptive cruise control features to ensure it doesn’t get too close to the cars in front of it. This even works in stop-and-go traffic if the highway is clogged up, which is fantastic since that’s one of the most annoying parts of driving for me.

There are two computers, one in each back corner of the car, to ensure that if one fails, there’s a backup. There is also a camera just under the instrument panel to monitor the driver’s eyes to make sure that you’re paying attention to the road. There is also a lightbar on the steering wheel and some haptic motors in the seat. The light bar goes green when Super Cruise is enabled, blue when you’re just using adaptive cruise control, and flashes red when the systems are disengaging. The seat vibrates on the left if the car is doing a left lane change, and vibrates on the right if it’s moving to the right. It also buzzes you when the system is disengaging, so there’s no way to miss it.

Once you’re on a compatible road that’s been mapped, a small icon of a steering wheel will pop up on your screen below the speedometer and next to the speed you’ve chosen for adaptive cruise control. Then, you can tap on a button on the steering wheel that also features a small steering wheel. Once you do, the system will take over, and you can take your hands off the wheel and feet off the pedals, and the car will drive itself. On compatible highways, it will do automatic lane changes, but once I got above North Bay, that part of the system stopped working, and I needed to perform lane changes manually. That said, the traffic was substantially less intense that far north, so it wasn’t really a huge deal.

The last thing you need to use Super Cruise is to pay for it. There are a few factors in the cost, starting with the trim level of the car you want, which includes Super Cruise. For example, I was in a GMC Acadia, and adding Super Cruise to it costs $3,385, plus when I was spec-ing it out to add Super Crusie, I also needed to add the $700 towing package, and there was no way to get Super Cruise without it for some reason. This brings the cost of Super Cruise up to around $4,000. The software is also free for the first three years after buying your car. After that, it will cost $30 per month in Canada. You can also subscribe for a few months and then cancel the service if you just want it for a road trip and don’t want it for the full year.

How was it

I was pretty excited to start my trip, and I wanted to get to Timmins before sundown, so I left pretty early at 6am so I’d make it there before the sun went down, and I was hoping to avoid some of the Toronto morning rush hour since I was leaving on a Thursday. That didn’t work out as well as I had hoped, so there was some traffic on the highway in the morning.

Getting onto the Don Valley Parkway out of downtown, I had to drive, but once I was on there, I was able to engage Super Cruise, and it carried me up a handful of kilometres until I needed to exit onto the 401 heading west. Things were going well from here, but once I hit traffic on the 401, it started to get a little nerve-racking. It wasn’t that the car was being squirrely — it handled itself fine — but I just wasn’t used to it yet, and it took a while for me to start trusting the system. That said, there was even a point where a large truck was a few hairs over the line beside me, and as I went past it, I could feel the car move over to avoid it, which really surprised me.

The rest of the drive went great for a while, but there was an instance above Vaughan where there was a lot of construction and no lines on the road, so the seat buzzed, prompting me to take over since the car couldn’t drive on this new section of the highway. However, in a few minutes, I was through it, and the self-driving symbol popped back up, allowing me to push the button on the steering wheel and have the car to take back over.

On these mapped highways between Toronto and North Bay, Super Cruise was also able to automatically change lanes, which means if you have your speed set to 110km/h and you pull up behind someone in the middle lane who’s only going 95km/h the car will start sensing to see if anyone is in the fast lane and if no one is there, it will turn on your signal light and pull out to pass. Then, once you’re around them, it will start sensing the right lane and move back into the middle lane. It’s pretty slick, and you can cancel this by hitting the opposite signal light direction.

While this works really great, I will say that sometimes it’s not as bright as a human driver. For instance, sometimes it will pull out around someone just to move back in and then pull out again and again. If I was in control and I saw all these cars in the slow lane, I would stay in the fast lane, pass all four at once, and then pull back into the right-hand lane. It’s not that the car is doing anything wrong, but it can feel a bit overkill on a busy highway to keep moving between lanes.

You also need to take over from the system when you’re in an exit lane, which is fine for the most part. However, when the old highway after North Bay would open up to two lanes for passing, and I had no one to pass, I would stay in the slow lane. When I got to the end of that lane, the car would see the lane-ending signs and disengage Super Cruise, so I needed to transfer back into the other lane manually and then re-engage Super Cruise once I moved over.

Would I buy a car with Super Cruise?

Absolutely, after using this system on a long drive, I was blown away by how well it worked. The simple fact that my leg wasn’t sore from holding a pedal down for seven hours was worth it in my eyes. Personally, I don’t drive very often, so I’d probably buy the hardware for my car and only get the subscription whenever I was going on road trips, but for someone that needs to spend an hour or more commuting every day on the highway, it would easily be worth it.

On top of that, modern cars with Super Cruise usually have a lot of GM’s safety features embedded in them, and while those aren’t really things I test often, it’s nice to know they’re there to make sure I don’t back into a fence or accidentally rear-end someone on the highway. There is also parking assist technology, and modern 360 cameras that make manually parking big cars like the Acadia I was testing very easy.

Overall, modern cars are starting to get really smart, and if there’s anything making me want to upgrade, it’s these features. I’m not the type of person who cares that much about engines or the look of the car. I just want something that can get me from point A to point B safely and efficiently, and modern vehicles with tech like this do that better than I ever would have dreamed possible when I was younger. Ideally, GM’s self-driving tech is going to get better and better over time, and I really like that the company has a camera watching me to make sure I don’t nod off or take my eyes off the road for too long, it’s a small feature, but it’s reassuring to know that driver attentiveness is still at the heart of this system since the tech is still so new, and as we’ve seen with some Tesla drivers, can be easily abused.

Right now in Canada and the U.S., GM has mapped 640,000 kilometres of highways and there is more to come, including someday the ability for GM’s consumer cars to map the roads themselves to help accelerate the mapping program even further.