Despite Concerns, Cadillac Presses Forward with Super Cruise Semi-Autonomous Tech
General Motors intends to launch a semi-autonomous feature called Super Cruise later this year despite the fact that federal safety regulators have already voiced concern about a key aspect of the system’s design.
Under certain highway conditions, according to company officials, the Super Cruise system can go after lanes, brake, and control speed. Slated to make its debut this fall on the two thousand eighteen Cadillac CT6 sedan, it is seen as a building block toward more sophisticated autonomous driving systems.
While GM touts the system as “true hands-free driving technology for the highway,” Super Cruise still requires drivers to pay attention to the road.
A puny camera located on top of the steering column uses infrared lights to track the driver’s head position when Super Cruise is activated. If the system determines a driver is inattentive, the motorist will receive an escalating series of cues and warnings that urge him or her to turn attention back to the road.
Should motorists overlook these alerts, the vehicle activates its hazard lights, and the Super Cruise system will bring the car to a managed stop; the issue is that it does so in the middle of its current lane rather than navigate to the shoulder of the road. That’s a potential safety hazard that eventually could lead to the recall of any cars tooled with Super Cruise, according to a top lawyer for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
In a November two thousand sixteen letter sent to General Motors, Paul Hemmersbaugh, then the agency’s chief counsel, wrote that “we note that GM indicates that when the driver is incapable or unwilling to take control of the vehicle the system will bring the vehicle to a stop in or near the roadway. We urge GM to fully consider the likely operation of the system it is contemplating and ensure that this fallback solution does not present an unreasonable risk to safety.”
A referenced footnote at the end of that paragraph reminds GM that “Federal law requires the recall of a vehicle that contains a safety-related defect (i.e., that may present an unreasonable risk of an accident occurring or of death and injury in an accident).”
Since penning that letter, Hemmersbaugh has left NHTSA and joined General Motors. In January, GM named him its chief counsel and public policy director of its Transportation as a Service division.
Hemmersbaugh, who could not be reached for comment, is one of many officials from the regulatory agency who have transitioned into prominent jobs inwards the industry they once oversaw. Last week, former NHTSA administrator Mark Rosekind joined Zoox, an autonomous-driving startup based in California. Rosekind’s predecessor, David Strickland, is a top lobbyist for the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, a group that advocates on behalf of Ford, Waymo, Volvo, Uber, and Lyft. Ron Medford, a former deputy administrator at NHTSA, is now Waymo’s director of safety.
As a result of the concern voiced in former regulator Hemmersbaugh’s November letter, General Motors says that Super Cruise engineers made switches to the system. Now, hazard lights are activated before a vehicle comes to a accomplish stop. “That provides an extra alert to vehicles around that something is happening,” a spokesperson said. Once the vehicle stops, OnStar places a call into the vehicle to determine if the driver needs help or emergency assistance.
In a written statement, GM described such scripts as a “limited event.” A NHTSA spokesperson did not comeback a request for comment, and it remains unknown whether this design switch will earn Super Cruise a more favorable impression from current regulators.
The flap over potential hazards involving such a system, which draws comparisons to Tesla’s Autopilot feature, illustrates the complexity of designing semi-autonomous or autonomous systems that still require occasional human oversight or intervention.
How manufacturers treat the interaction inbetween human and machine remains and open—and sometimes contentious—question. Some manufacturers, in particular Waymo and Ford, balk at the idea of keeping human motorists involved in the driving process at all and are developing autonomous technology that eliminates the need for drivers to retain oversight.
NHTSA has scrutinized semi-autonomous systems that require human involvement in the wake of a deadly crash last year that killed one motorist who had engaged the Autopilot feature in his Tesla Model S. The agency conducted a six-month investigation of that May seven crash but did not find a defect and ordered no further activity.
Unlike more advanced systems, General Motors classifies Super Cruise as a Level two autonomous system, one that NHTSA defines as a driver-assist feature in which the vehicle can conduct some parts of the driving but humans retain responsibility for monitoring the environment and spectacle.
“We knew it was significant to keep the driver engaged during operation,” said Barry Walkup, chief engineer of Super Cruise. “That’s why we’ve added a driver-attention function, to insist on driver supervision.”
When using Super Cruise, drivers are required to conduct lane switches by hand. But the system’s hands-free operations should give drivers time to accomplish common tasks in their vehicles such as using the navigation system, adjusting radio volume, or taking a phone call, GM said.
Delayed in its arrival, the Super Cruise system combines information from GPS location data, cameras, and radar to sense its environment and plot its path along roadways. Albeit it does not actually have lidar sensors as part of the system, it also uses lidar map data that is stored on board. Super Cruise will be suggested as an option on the CT6 sedan.
Pete Bigelow is the transportation, technology, and mobility editor at Car and Driver. He can be reached via email at [email protected] and followed on Twitter@PeterCBigelow.
UPDATE: Two days after we published this story, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) substituted the letter it sent to General Motors on November Legitimate, 2016, regarding Super Cruise with a different version in its online archives. We’ve updated the quote attributed to Hemmersbaugh above accordingly.
When Car and Driver requested comment from NHTSA on why the letter was switched almost five months after it was made publicly available on the agency’s website, a spokesperson for the federal agency replied with a written statement:
“Last fall, NHTSA provided GM with an interpretation letter explaining its position regarding their Super Cruise semi-autonomous feature. The official version was sent to GM while a different version was posted on our website. The agency regrets this unintentional error and has substituted the original letter in the database with the version sent to GM.”