RE: Is GM's Super Cruise About To Upstage Telsa's Autopilot?21 Jan 2021 01:13
Last spring, GM's head of global product development and purchasing, Doug Parks, said the automaker was working on a version of Super Cruise that would function in “neighborhoods, city streets and subdivisions,” which he referred to as “Ultra Cruise” and said would still need the driver to monitor it, just like with Super Cruise, thus ranking it at Level 2 on the SAE scale of self-driving capability. Level 3 is the first stage where no driver monitoring is required and Level 5 is the ultimate goal, i.e. a system that can function at the same level as a human.
Interestingly, GM filed a trademark for Ultra Cruise in 2018, though in this case GM said in the description that Ultra Cruise was “for the semi-autonomous driving of motor vehicles,” the key word here being "semi." This word doesn't feature in the description for Hyper Cruise, which suggests GM may be preparing a new driver-assist feature more capable than both the Super Cruise and Ultra Cruise systems, one capable of operating without the need for monitoring by the driver. Such capability has already been demonstrated by the Cruise self-driving technology startup that GM backs.