Super Cruise rollout slow, but Cadillac is optimistic

DETROIT — Super Cruise, a Cadillac-exclusive system that General Motors introduced in 2017 as "the world's first true hands-free driver assistance feature for the freeway," has won praise from critics of similar technologies offered by Tesla and other brands. And notably, it hasn't been linked to any serious crashes.

But the system will have been out for at least two and a half years by the time it moves beyond a single vehicle, the Cadillac CT6 sedan. Cadillac says Super Cruise will be available on the CT5 starting in 2020 before ultimately spreading throughout the brand's lineup.

That's because GM executives didn't make the decision to put the Super Cruise rollout into high gear until June 2018, two months after the company ousted Cadillac President Johan de Nysschen. That's when Steve Carlisle, who replaced de Nysschen, and Mark Ruess, the GM president who was then product chief, voted to install Super Cruise across the lineup as quickly as possible, Carlisle told Automotive News at the brand's headquarters in Warren, Mich.

By that time, development of the XT4 and XT6, two crossovers that arrived at dealerships in the past year, was too far along for the system to be available at the time of their introduction. Cadillac, which GM also is positioning as its lead electrification brand, now is rushing to add Super Cruise to those and other vehicles over the next two years, Carlisle and Rory Harvey, Cadillac's vice president of sales, service and marketing, said in an interview last week.

The slow rollout of Super Cruise has been fodder for critics of Cadillac, including dealers who already had waited years for the brand to update the sedan-heavy lineup that was costing them sales at a time when crossovers and SUVs became far more popular.

Still, executives say Cadillac is on the right path to growth and that progress will become more apparent in the brand's performance during the second half of the year.
In the first half, Cadillac had 7.4 percent of the U.S. luxury market, essentially flat with the same period in 2018, according to the Automotive News Data Center. Cadillac has prioritized growing into new categories over share growth, Deborah Wahl, who was Cadillac's chief marketing officer until a promotion last week to GM's global chief marketing officer, said in a separate interview. Wahl spoke with Automotive News on Wednesday, Sept. 4, a day before her job change was announced. (See story, Page 8.)

"Often in automotive, we're locked in market share battles, which is a core part of the business, but over the long term, does it really … get you to the next level?" she said.

Launching in new categories such as electric vehicles, subscription programs and automated driving leads to more growth and value, Wahl said.

"Really focusing on innovation pipelines and making sure that we're at the tip of the spear on that is the best way to drive … category growth," she said. "That takes it to expand the marketplace, expand the customer purview of what the possibilities are."

Compliance with safety standards has factored into the Super Cruise rollout, a spokesman said. The CT6 was the first vehicle with Super Cruise because Cadillac knew it would provide a manageable amount of feedback to learn from the system as it continues to develop. CT6 sales in the first half of the year fell 17 percent to 4,050, according to the Automotive News Data Center, and GM's plan to end production at the plant that makes the CT6 as soon as January means the car's future is uncertain.

The technology also needs to be designed to fit within GM's new digital architecture, which rolls out on the CT5 when it goes on sale in December and then on the CT4 and Escalade. The previous digital architecture wasn't as robust, the spokesman said.

"The Super Cruise that we launch on the CT5 will be enhanced from what's on CT6 and so on and so on," Carlisle said. "Not only that, but it's backwards compatible. So we can do firmware and software updates to increase the capability of current Super Cruise cars."

Super Cruise uses mapping along with GPS and onboard sensors and cameras to allow hands-free driving. In June, GM expanded the Super Cruise road network to 200,000 miles. That made the system usable on 70,000 more miles of roadway in the U.S. and Canada that have been mapped using lidar.