After Tesla’s (in)famous Autopilot and General Motors' expanding Super Cruise, Ford is also bringing a hands-free highway driving technology to the streets of United States and Canada. And it also has a proper name, as the Blue Oval naturally baptized the semi-autonomous system as “BlueCruise.”
It’s a lot closer to GM’s Super Cruise take on the driving assistance technology than Tesla’s Autopilot. That's because the Ford BlueCruise should grant drivers some added comfort and confidence thanks to “hands-free driving on prequalified sections of divided highways called Hands-Free Blue Zones” that were mapped on North American roads by the company.
So far, there’s more than 100k (161,000 km) of designated miles, and the second-largest U.S. automaker must have traveled them all for its 110,000-mile (177,000-km) “Mother of All Road Trips” across the United States and Canada. It was done after 500k of miles (804,672 km) of development testing and served as proof of concept for the viability of the new feature in various driving and weather conditions.
Actually, we’ve known for some time about this hands-free driving feature being earmarked for arrival on certain Ford vehicles. The company will keep its word by announcing the 2021 Ford F-150 and 2021 Mustang Mach-E as the very first models to receive BlueCruise. There’s a pre-requisite, though, as the truck and all-electric SUV must be already equipped with the Ford Co-Pilot360 Active 2.0 Prep Package.
There’s no need to do anything special beyond that, as the function will be delivered over-the-air (OTA) as a wireless software update later this year (no exact date has been advanced yet, though). The feature is labeled as SAE Level 2 driver-assist technology, very similar in nature to Autopilot and Super Cruise (Ford even mentions both). Actually, it was used by ten vehicles late last year (five F-150 and another five Mach-Es) for the “Mother of All Road Trips” that saw them travel across 37 American states and an additional five Canadian provinces.
After the launch on the fourteenth-generation truck and the first-ever Mustang EV, BlueCruise will trickle down to other Ford models. All users will continue to receive further OTA updates that will include new additions such as Lane Change Assist or Predictive Speed Assist alongside an expansion of the mapped areas.
Aurel has aimed high all his life (literally, at 16 he was flying gliders all by himself) so in 2006 he switched careers and got hired as a writer at his favorite magazine. Since then, his work has been published both by print and online outlets, most recently right here, on autoevolution. Full profile
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