Video: 2018 Cadillac CT6 Super Cruise

Cadillac may have an answer for that though, with it's hands-free super cruise. It's an adaptive cruise control system that on highways and interstates and lets you go hands free. Now we're going to put that to the test on 90/94 from Chicago to O'Hare airport and see if we can go the distance hands-free. So as we get onto the expressway, activating Super Cruise is not as easy as it could be. There is a little gray light that pops up in the dashboard or in the instrument cluster and the car has to be on the center line of the road for that to appear. It's not always easy to see the little gray icon because the steering wheel might even block it depending on your driving position. It would have been very nice to have that in the head-up display of the CT6, but that's not the case. It takes a little work to identify when Super Cruise is ready. And so now we're on the expressway and we are going to wait for it to pop up and let's get this show on the road. All right, Super Cruise is active and we're good. We are hands free. The steering wheel has illuminated and it's a green little light so it is telling me that Super Cruise is active. And I am going to turn the Adaptive cruise control up to 65 miles an hour and we're golden. So at mile marker 1.1 we've started Super Cruise. So let's see how far we can get. What super cruise does exceptionally well is it holds its position in the lane. Better than other systems at least in my experience on these roads. It holds that center position in the road better than Tesla's Autopilot and Volvo's Pilot Assist. The big downside is it only works on certain roads, on those pre-programmed pre-scanned roads. It's not going to work on a two-lane highway without a center divider or one of the other many, many thousands of miles of roads that aren't programmed into the Super Cruise System. That's unlike Tesla's Autopilot or Volvo's Pilot Assist that will work on almost any road, as long as there are lane markings and the cameras can read where the car is. But this is certainly an impressive system when it does work. What are the ways that Super Cruise allows people to go hands-free and for them to actually recommend it, is it uses a driver facing infrared camera and it's looking at head position. Ooh, Super Cruise has been disengaged. So the red light on the steering wheel started barking at me saying Super Cruise is going to disengage. So I am going to reactivate Super Cruise. (GPS system speaks) And again, I try to reactivate it and it tells me it's going to disengage. Now, I've lost the Super Cruise icon altogether. I am going to try and change lanes. (upbeat music) So I can use the turn signal to change lanes. It kind of thinks about it, while you're changing lanes and then when you're back in the lane, it reactivates Super Cruise. It doesn't work like Tesla's Autopilot where you flip the turn signal and it will change lanes automatically. We are coming up to a split in the highway where 94 goes North and 90 goes West. I'm curious to see how it's going to handle. If it's going to keep me in the lane to go to 90 West out toward the airport, or if it's going to disengage. As you can see, Super Cruise does a pretty good job of moving with the road curvature. So it is steering on this slightly curvy highway. There is a point though, where there can be too much steering angle and it will turn itself off. So the warning systems first, if it senses, you're not paying attention, the little green light will start flashing at you, you know, "Hey, pay attention." If it goes a little further, it will say it'll start flashing red, and it's like, "Okay, what's going on here? We're gonna turn this off. And you think about what you did wrong." And then the last alert is, "All right, party's over, that's it." It will turn it off, it'll have an audible voice saying, "Please pay attention", and then it will automatically slow the car down to a stop. And if you still haven't responded, it will call OnStar's Emergency Services. Okay, so we're approaching the interchange here (GPS system speaks) where 90 West and 94 West split and it turned itself off and a truck's trying kill me. Cool. So yeah, it disengaged and now there's no Super Cruise icon. So we're going to split off on to 90 West here and hopefully let's see. All right, Super Cruise is back and it's off and we're back on Super Cruise is engaged, hands are off the steering wheel. We are paying attention. Still it feels very natural. Like a human is driving. There's not a lot of jerky moments and it doesn't ping pong between the lanes either like some other systems. It does a really good job, even when we're next to a truck where it wants to suck you in or in heavy winds, it's correcting very well and keeping the car on the center of the road. So we're cruising about 65 miles an hour, and now we're coming to a traffic slow down. So we will see if it keeps it active during this slow period too. And yet we're chugging along at 16 miles an hour, Super Cruise, still active, no hand on steering wheel requirement. This is pretty nice. If you had to do this commute often, this would be a great system. This also really makes on-camera dialogue easier because I talk with my hands. We made it through O'Hare, not totally hands-free, but some of that was by design, where the highway split, but when it is working, it works really well. It's one of the better next level adaptive cruise control's out there with just how well it centers the car in its lane and how smooth and comfortable it makes you feel when the feature is active. Two of its biggest knacks though, are that it only works on certain highways and if you don't live around them, then what's the point and two, right now it's only available on the CT6, a sedan that we're not especially enamored with. But if you're looking at the CT6 and you'll live where there are roads where Super Cruise works, then it's a no brainer, you gotta get it! (upbeat music fades away)