GM’s Super Cruise finally conquers the Trans-Canada Highway across Newfoundland

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In Canada, the sun rises first on Newfoundland, but for drivers, it seems everything else arrives late. The Trans-Canada Highway across the province was not officially opened until 1966, four years after the rest of the country. Electric vehicles remain rare because of a sparse public charging network. And while General Motors vehicles have been driven hands-free with Super Cruise assistance for more than 1.6 billion kilometres in Canada and the United States, it’s taken until this year to finally use it across Newfoundland.

However, General Motors properly mapped Newfoundland’s stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway in February – along with Prince Edward Island – to complete the hands-free network from west to east. I flew here to give it a try in a Chevrolet Traverse.

Super Cruise is a driver assistance feature exclusive to General Motors, though rivals such as Ford and Stellantis offer similar systems. However, GM’s version covers by far the most highway distance and includes non-divided, two-lane roads. It allows the driver to take their hands off the wheel and feet off the pedals for extended periods, potentially for hours at a time. It is not fully autonomous, however; an interior camera continuously monitors the driver’s eyes to ensure they’re watching the road, ready to take the wheel when needed.

I’ve used Super Cruise before and found it capable, but this drive across The Rock was different. The technology uses cameras and both short- and long-range radar to read the road ahead. It then matches that data to GPS information mapped earlier by a LiDAR-equipped vehicle. This locates your vehicle within a few centimetres on almost a million kilometres of roads. When active, a strip across the steering wheel glows green; when it stops working, the light strip disappears and the seat vibrates to alert the driver to take back control.

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The system is very good, but it’s nowhere near as comprehensive as Tesla’s astonishing Full Self Driving (Supervised) system. The Tesla feature uses cameras that feed image information into the car’s onboard neural network, learned from other Tesla vehicles. It then uses those images to make driving decisions based on observed human behaviour. It has no need for pre-mapped routes and can drive from almost anywhere to almost anywhere – navigating intersections, stop signs and roundabouts along the way. It is not perfect, however, and still needs to be monitored by the driver.

Driver assistance technology is not about encouraging laziness or driving when you shouldn’t. It’s about safety: it’s more sets of eyes on the road ahead and around. The system makes smart, computer-fed decisions that you can evaluate as you drive, accepting or dismissing them as you see fit.

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I stopped halfway across the island at Norris Arm to visit Michelle Higgins, who I first met in 2012, shortly after she crashed her car into a moose on the Trans-Canada Highway. Moose collisions are common in Newfoundland, and it seems every resident has a near-miss story. The provincial government has spent millions of dollars on fencing, signage and even an infra-red camera warning system, but fatal collisions still happen every year. Higgins’s crash was notable because she immediately went into such a state of shock that she didn’t realize what had happened, and carried on driving the 40 kilometres to her job in Gander, unaware that her neck was broken and her car’s roof was rolled back like a sardine tin.

Last August, she had another collision that sent her to hospital, but not with a moose. This time, an older Chevrolet Suburban side-swiped her 12-year-old Equinox as she waited to turn left off the Trans-Canada, across its path. She says the Suburban strayed from its lane and sent her spinning, though there were no witnesses and no charges were laid. This is exactly the kind of collision Super Cruise is designed to prevent. Her stationary Equinox could not have avoided the oncoming SUV, but a Super Cruise-equipped Suburban would have stayed in its lane and passed safely.

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She’s been turned off driving now, as you might expect, so I told her about the Super Cruise system on the Chevrolet Traverse. “If I had to get another car, I’d like to have the one that drives itself,” she told me. “I think that way, then I would be more at ease, knowing that you’ve got something there to have your back, even if it’s not a person. It’s a good thing, right?”

Modern collision avoidance systems can also detect objects on the road ahead. They can even differentiate between pedestrians and wildlife, allowing the vehicle to execute the most effective emergency crash avoidance strategy. (Pedestrians should be avoided at almost all costs while wildlife can be struck if braking or gentle swerving is not possible). You don’t need Super Cruise for this safety feature, though its long-range radar helps.

I drove the final leg of a cross-country journey organized by General Motors that left Victoria, B.C., a couple of weeks earlier. The various Super Cruise vehicles in the group apparently drove hands-free and without incident for the vast majority of the trek.

In Newfoundland, however, most of the Trans-Canada Highway is a single lane in each direction, with an occasional third lane for passing. When the passing lane appeared, the Traverse usually stayed in the left overtaking lane, or switched off Super Cruise and prompted me to manually choose my lane.

Occasionally, it moved itself to the right lane. At the end of every three-lane stretch, Super Cruise would switch itself off, though it would resume with the tap of a button. The break in standard lane markings exceeded the system’s capabilities. Additionally, where temporary speed limits exist – for example, construction zones – it failed to recognize the lower speed limit signs and stayed at its highway speed.

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I set the Traverse to overtake automatically, but it would only do this on a divided highway, protected from oncoming traffic veering into my lane. Even so, I used the system whenever possible – including on long stretches of single-lane roads off the Trans-Canada – and found it relaxing and comfortable.

The system can be used while towing trailers, automatically adjusting the vehicle’s inputs for potential sway, though I didn’t get to test this. It would shut off at stop signs and traffic lights – alerting me clearly well in advance – but it didn’t take long for me to trust the car to make its own turns on curving roads. It would switch off Super Cruise, however, when the turns became too tight, more than about 45 degrees. The Tesla system, for what it’s worth, is capable of making much tighter turns of 90 degrees and more while navigating through all manner of intersections and road obstructions.

Super Cruise is an option across 23 General Motors’ models, and GM says there are nearly 750,000 compatible vehicles on the road today. GM provides the feature free for the first three years alongside its OnStar safety and connectivity services. After three years, OnStar One with Super Cruise costs $69.99 a month, and Super Cruise on its own costs $39.99 a month. Much like the Tesla FSD subscription, which costs $99 a month, you can pay for just a month at a time, turning it on or off whenever you want – even, now, in Newfoundland.

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The writer was a guest of the automaker. Content was not subject to approval.

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