A billion miles in less than a decade: GM's Super Cruise reaches a milestone

When Super Cruise debuted in the Cadillac CT6 in 2017, it showed there was a responsible way to give drivers a hands-free assistance system. Unlike Tesla, General Motors geofenced the system to only work on restricted-access highways that had been lidar-scanned and HD-mapped ahead of time. What’s more, it added a driver-facing infrared camera to track their gaze and ensure their eyes remain on the road ahead for the system to stay active.

After starting out in the Cadillac flagship sedan, GM began adding Super Cruise to more and more of its models, and the system has just passed a billion miles driven (1.6 billion km) across almost 750,000 vehicles in the US and Canada. “And we’re continuing to grow that, both with the new sales and also we have a very high renewal rate,” said Rashed Haq, vice president of autonomous vehicles at GM.

That renewal rate is close to 40 percent for GM owners with Super Cruise, according to Haq, which is free for the first three years then is tied to an active OnStar subscription. “It really shows how Super Cruise is passing what I call the toothbrush test. The customers are using it continuously. Once they use it, they never go back. They continue to use it, and then they use it multiple times a day, just like a toothbrush. So it’s really past that kind of stickiness test,” Haq told me.

The mapped road network has grown quite a lot since the early days. When I first tested the system in a CT6 in 2018, it included more than 160,000 miles (258,000 km); now you can use Super Cruise on close to 700,000 miles (1.1 million km) of highways. According to GM’s statistics, it’s used an average of 17 miles (27 km) and for 24 minutes per trip, with more than half of Super Cruise-enabled drivers using it weekly or daily, the automaker says.

Its usage is escalating, doubling year on year, with 7.1 million hours of active use and 485.9 million miles (782 million km) across 28.7 million trips in 2025. For comparison, Tesla’s FSD—which can be used on all roads, not just restricted-access divided lane highways—has ~1.3 million active subscriptions and, according to Tesla, surpassed 8.4 billion miles (13.5 billion km) earlier this year, racking up roughly half of that in 2025 alone.

Meanwhile, GM has been working on a more advanced version of Super Cruise for some time. Originally, this was going to be a system called Ultra Cruise and, like FSD, would work on surface streets as well as highways, making it suitable for virtually all driving scenarios. That system was set to debut in an electric Cadillac in 2023.

Instead, the more advanced version will retain the Super Cruise branding, and the focus here is on adding eyes-off capability on the highway, transforming Super Cruise from a “level 2+” driver assist to a more partially automated “level 3” system, debuting in a couple of years in the Cadillac Escalade IQ. “Customers should be able to use it sometime in 2028. We’re on track for that. And I think you’ve seen that about a month and a half ago, we started driving supervised in multiple states, so it’s in active testing already,” Haq told Ars.