Driverless In Detroit

Even General Motors thinks the age of autonomous cars is inevitable.

- Keith Naughton

"I like to drive cars," says Mark Reuss, product development chief at General Motors, "So this is a little funny."

Not funny-ha-ha, he clarifies, but funny-odd. He’s sitting in the driver’s seat, with his hands on his thighs and his feet on the floor of a big Cadillac that’s driving itself around a banked oval.

Reuss is at GM’s 4,000-acre proving ground in rural Michigan, hidden from the public behind locked gates, tall trees, and security befitting a prison. The company’s been debugging its cars here since 1924. It’s a brilliant, sunny autumn afternoon—a nice day for being driven. Dozens of tests are going on, though it appears that his is the only one where no one’s holding the wheel.

Reuss is on edge. He forces a nervous laugh as the car takes itself up to 70 miles per hour. If he has any fast-twitch impulses rocketing across the synapses of his brain— Take the wheel, damn it!—he doesn’t give in.

“This is the cat’s meow,” he says.

Cadillac, which was two decades old when flappers were saying things like “the cat’s meow,” will be the first GM division to come with Super Cruise, the company’s most ambitious technological foray since automatic transmission. The system isn’t fully autonomous. Pairing adaptive cruise control with lane-centering technology, it will allow drivers, or whatever they’re called in the future, to cede control to the car only on the highway. It will also, if all goes according to plan, propel GM into a multibillion-dollar race for the future of human mobility.