Cadillac has officially announced plans to introduce Ultra Cruise – an advanced driver assist technology that promises the capability of “door to door hands-free driving” in 95 percent of all driving scenarios.
Ultra Cruise will be considered a Level 2 Advanced Driver Assist System (ADAS), making it an expanded version of the luxury marque’s current semi-autonomous driver assist feature, Super Cruise. Ultra Cruise will feature the ability to autonomously drive the vehicle on city streets, while also adding greater automated driving capabilities on the highway.
Ultra Cruise will also feature an all-new dynamic display that feeds relevant driver-assist experience information to vehicle occupants. The technology will offer permanent traffic control device recognition, internal navigation route following, vehicle speed maintenance, automatic and on-demand lane changing, close object avoidance, and residential driveway parking.
The upcoming Ultra Cruise technology was developed in-house by Cadillac’s parent company, General Motors. It will utilize an extensive array of visual cameras, radar and LiDAR features that provide a 360-degree field of perception around the vehicle. The upcoming driver assist technology makes uses of the luxury marque’s Vehicle Intelligence Platform (VIP), otherwise known as the Global B platform.
Global B / VIP serves as an advanced “nervous system” that allows for intra-vehicle communication of advanced sensors and their controls needed to make Ultra Cruise works. It also enables over-the-air updates and is also capable of delivering information to Cadillac’s back office data ecosystem for continuous system improvement.
Cadillac plans to launch Ultra Cruise on select models in 2023. The advanced driver assist system will be compatible with more than two million roads in the U.S. and Canada at launch, with plans to expand to 3.4 million miles shortly thereafter. It will ultimately encompass all paved roads in North America. Though it wasn’t part of the announcement, we also expect Cadillac to make Ultra Cruise available in China.
At CES 2022, Cadillac announced that one of the first vehicles to feature Ultra Cruise will be the Celestiq – the luxury marque’s upcoming flagship electric sedan. Recently, Cadillac Society spied a fourth-generation Escalade testing a Leica Pegasus: Two rig, indicating that the full-size SUV is being used as a test subject for Ultra Cruise technology.
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