Today all car makers are struggling to bring out more and more autonomous features for their cars. The thing is, most of the time, they aren’t exactly input-free and still require some of your attention span.
The reasoning behind these systems using such fail-safe features is to make sure that you don’t fall asleep behind the wheel, in which case you’d probably put yourself and others in danger. However, people have been asking for hands-free autonomous driving aids for quite some time now.
Well, it seems like Cadillac will be one of the first car makers out there that will offer such a system. Speaking to John McElroy from Autoline, Cadillac’s Director of Electric and Control Systems Research Lab for General Motors, Cem Saraydar, said that the new CT6 will have this on the table thanks to its Super Cruise feature.
According to him, you won’t have to keep your hands on the wheel anymore but you will still be ‘in the loop’ and responsible for your actions. Unfortunately, he doesn’t specify how Cadillac’s new system will keep you alert but things are promising, none the less.
At the moment, the systems from the competition all require some driver input and they usually ask you to keep your hands on the wheel. We’re talking about the Mercedes-Benz Distronic Plus with Steering Assist system and the Volvo Lane Keeping Aid for example. The last one we even had the chance of testing a couple of weeks back and we were impressed with how well it worked.
However, both of them will ask you to keep at least one hand on the wheel which is not all that great, considering the purpose the engineers had in mind when designing them.
Of course, as we said, these are fail-safe triggers that are meant to keep you even safer but let’s think about this for a second. You have active cruise control that can brake your car to a complete stop and you have a lane-keeping aid system that will keep you away from guardrails on the highway.
What could happen in case you did fall asleep? Well, you’ll probably end up stopped on the side of the road as soon as you hit a traffic jam. That’s when the real issues show up as people coming in from behind would have to avoid your car but other than that, I think you’d be pretty safe. It will be interesting to see how things will evolve, though.
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