GM unveils eyes-off driving for Cadillac, adds Gemini AI

If you have ever used hands-free highway driving, you know the drill: your hands are off the wheel, but your eyes are glued to the road while infrared sensors track every blink.

GM wants to change that. At its GM Forward event in New York, the automaker announced plans to introduce an eyes-off, hands-off highway driving system in 2028, starting with the all-electric Cadillac Escalade IQ. CEO Mary Barra noted that the rollout will move much faster than Super Cruise did.

Powering this leap is a new centralized computing platform that ties together propulsion, steering, braking, safety, and infotainment over a high-speed Ethernet backbone. GM claims the new architecture delivers 35 times more AI performance and 1,000 times more bandwidth than previous hardware.

Inside the cabin, GM is also rolling out conversational AI powered by Google Gemini next year for trip planning and messaging, with plans to eventually deploy custom in-house AI.

Absorbing Cruise into personal cars

Instead of starting from scratch, GM is repurposing technology from Cruise, its robotaxi subsidiary that was shuttered in December 2024. GM absorbed the business, rehired key engineers, and integrated Cruise's tech stack into its production roadmap.

That includes AI models trained on over five million driverless miles and virtual simulation frameworks. Unlike Tesla's vision-only approach, GM is sticking to sensor fusion, combining integrated LiDAR, radar, and cameras.

Sterling Anderson, GM executive vice president of global product and former co-founder of autonomous startup Aurora, pointed out that robotaxis made sense when hardware was exorbitantly expensive. By 2025, sensor and computing costs dropped dramatically, allowing GM to leverage its high-volume manufacturing lines for private vehicles instead.

Driving beyond the mapped highways

Mercedes-Benz currently offers the only commercial Level 3 system in the United States with Drive Pilot, but it is strictly limited to low-speed traffic jams on specific pre-mapped highways in California and Nevada.

GM aims to leapfrog those constraints. Baris Cetinok, GM senior vice president of software and services, stated that its eyes-off system will function on highways that GM has not even mapped, only requiring human takeover for specific maneuvers like off-ramps.

Cetinok stressed that human takeover should never be treated as an escape hatch for sudden roadside emergencies. The system must handle those itself.

GM's foundation is solid: its existing Super Cruise ADAS is available across 23 models, covering roughly 600,000 mapped highway miles and logging more than 700 million miles without a single crash, according to the company.

Why it matters

True eyes-off driving fundamentally transforms the daily commute. Turning highway travel into usable personal time where drivers can legally answer emails or relax without cabin monitors nagging them is the holy grail of personal vehicle automation.

However, a 2028 timeline on a luxury electric SUV like the Escalade IQ means mainstream drivers are years away from touching it. The immediate value is more of a strategic roadmap than an off-the-shelf feature.

For the broader industry, this marks a massive shift away from the standalone robotaxi dream toward consumer production cars. We think GM's strategy of recycling Cruise's battle-tested models into high-end retail vehicles is smart, directly challenging Tesla's camera-only FSD and Mercedes's ultra-cautious Level 3. The biggest hurdle will not just be software tuning, but legal liability when the driver takes their eyes off the road for good.