The main limitation of Super Cruise is geographical. Unlike Tesla’s system, which can be activated on almost any road, Super Cruise can only be activated on the few hundred thousand kilometers of American roadway that GM has mapped. In practice, this means it will work on most state highways and highways. I didn’t keep track of it, but I estimate it was available about two-thirds of the way through our trip.
The system takes some getting used to; there’s a bit of nervousness the first few times you turn it on – you keep your hands on the wheel to make sure it actually drives – but it didn’t take long for me to start trusting it.
What does one do in the driver’s seat, if not drive? It’s basically like being a passenger. For tens of miles on end, the car asks nothing of you. Freed from the grind of driving, you can let your eyes wander through the landscape and let your mind reflect on the mundane and the deep. It’s not like you’re completely distracted — even when you’re lost in thought, you can stay situationally aware of the road ahead — but the reduction in stress is significant. With Super Cruise I was able to drive much further one day and feel much calmer afterwards, almost as if I hadn’t done anything at all.
What this all boils down to is, after a while, a bloated sense of confidence, a sense that your car can take you anywhere more or less without any problems. With Super Cruise I was able to drive further than I could otherwise, with less stress. (And the Escalade’s many screens allow my kids to sit in the car longer than they otherwise would have done with less fuss. My son, who is 11, spent much of the trip playing Xbox on the display on the rear seat.)
A snow storm came up while we were in Los Alamos, NM, and if I had been in another car, I probably would have waited for the snow to pass before I was out of town. But the Escalade jumped me to my feet: suspecting that self-driving in the snow wouldn’t be as annoying as self-driving in clear weather, I chose to continue driving in potentially dangerous conditions.
This is exactly the kind of thinking that urban scientists believe promotes sprawl. America’s first wave of urban sprawl, which began after World War II, was fueled in part by the plummeting price of automobiles and the development of the interstate highway system. Artificial intelligence researcher Carlos Ignacio Gutierrez argues in a recent article that autonomous cars could have a similar effect: If self-driving commuting for an hour is as easy as driving a manual commute for half an hour, an owner of a self-driving car reasonably decide to move to more affordable housing further from city centers. And going further afield — that is, creating sprawl — intensifies reliance on cars by making alternative modes of transportation such as walking or cycling more difficult.
At the moment this is just a theory, but it is a plausible one. Some studies have already shown that people who use advanced driver assistance systems drive more than people who don’t.
