2024 Cadillac CT5

CLINT: This is a good test for the car because we're needing to get over soon-- whoa, whoa! Jesus. [UPBEAT MUSIC] BRIAN WONG: Here today, we're testing hands-free driving systems. And we have vehicles from GM, Ford, BMW, and Tesla all here. CLINT: As the name implies, a hands-free system lets you do this on the highway when the car allows. Now technically, Tesla doesn't let you do that. But we both know you weren't going to let us do this video and not talk about full self-driving. And we work for you. BRIAN WONG: We'll be testing these systems here, on LA freeways. And we're going to test things like how easy they are to activate, how well they handle driving tasks, and even how often they turn off and hand control back over to the driver. CLINT: Welcome to a very traffic-ridden onramp, onto the 405 in Los Angeles, the center point of pain in this city. I'm driving a 2023 Ford Mustang Mach-E GT. More importantly, I'm driving a car equipped with Ford's BlueCruise hands-free driver system. This is BlueCruise 1.3, which is the most updated version of the system. And they've made some really important improvements. This car is going to do better on windy roads. It's going to stay in the lane, repositioned better. And it also does automatic lane changes now, all of which we will be testing out. Now this is interesting because we're immediately getting right into traffic, which is the full LA experience. One thing I love about BlueCruise, it is very, very easy to activate. You push the button one time, on the left-hand side of the steering wheel. And then when it decides it's time to fire up, it's time to fire up. Because we're kind of like zippering in with traffic still, hands free is not active yet. But adaptive cruise control is-- right as it's about to love tap this Lexus. I said we'd be talking about the limitations of these driver systems, and you just saw one happen literally in the first tens of this test. So we're set now to highway speed. Hands-free is active. I see right now that the car is keeping me in this lane. The navigation is on the screen. If you get this cute little bubble surrounding the car with BlueCruise, that's how Hands-Free is activated. I wish they gave you the indication over on the center screen, as well. It's a giant, 15-inch vertical iPad. They probably had room to throw it on there. Like most hands-free systems, BlueCruise does not work when you're going around and changing highway. What I'm curious to see is how it does with this first lane change. So it's preparing lane change. And it does it on its own. This is where I should point out that in bumper-to-bumper traffic, the car will not do an automatic lane change. So in this case, it's just easier for me to do it the old-fashioned way, check over the shoulder, driver's-license style. And there's a Subaru who almost certainly would have gone right into us, had I let the car do that. So we're in the first five minutes of this and already, I can point out two or three instances where it's just easier for me to take control rather, than have the car do it. I think one thing that sticks out to me, of why I've come to love BlueCruise so much, is that one, it's a lot better than it used to be. We own a Ford F-150 Lightning in our long-term test fleet. And that car has an older version of BlueCruise, which I've been driving this week as part of our testing and prep for this video. And it is awful. It is awful by comparison to this car. So even the tweaks they've made in two, three versions have come a long way. It's a lot like Tesla in that regard. One of the parts that's not so great with BlueCruise now is that, like everything else in this world, it costs money. There's a subscription fee now. You can either pay per month or over the cost of the entire year to have the system active. So again, like Tesla, Ford is going to be putting this feature on more of its vehicles. And it's up to you to decide whether or not you want to pay for it. This is a good test for the car because we're needing to get over soon-- whoa, whoa! Jesus. OK, let my heart rate come down for a second. It made the lane change. But the difference in speed there was probably 40mph. My heart is racing right now. That's an important reminder that we need to keep talking about, is a hands-free system, right now, can still give you back control within one second, within one second. So your reaction time needs to be there. It's really off-putting when you're not doing the steering, you're not doing the braking or the acceleration, you're in this chill mode. But then you ask the car to make a lane change and you're 5 feet from being in the rear end of a Civic. We got a long way to go, folks. BRIAN WONG: So I'm here, in the 2023 BMW i7. And we're about to get on the freeway, which is where the hands-free system activates. So just like the one in the Ford and the GM, you can only get in hands-free on a divided highway. And we're coming up to one right here, as soon as this traffic clears up a little bit. So the system that you're going to use here, in the screen, is an add-on to the adaptive cruise control. And it's called Assisted Driving Plus. But then the real important part of that is that this vehicle comes with something called Highway Assistant. Now, most BMWs that have another level-two system have what's called Traffic Jam Assistant. And that system only works up to a 40 miles an hour. The one here, in the i7 though, works up to 80 miles an hour. And that's the system that's eventually going to make its way into more BMW products, down the line. The way you turn it on is, you first turn on the adaptive cruise controlled via this little button here, on the steering wheel. It tells me that Assisted Driving is activated. But that's not what we want. We want the Assist Plus system to turn on. So you have to wait for the car to settle in for a second, recognize that it's on the highway. And then another icon will pop up here, in the little instrument cluster, that tells me Assist Plus is ready. I hit this Mode button, right here. And then once it lights up green, you get these little green lights on the steering wheel as well. And then you're in hands-free mode. Part of the reason that LA traffic is so good to test these systems is that we can put them in stressful conditions. So right now, we're actually coming up to an interchange. There's a lot of cars moving in and out. And the system did slow down once when it saw a vehicle ahead of me actually signal and start to move into the lane. But it didn't stop abruptly or do anything like that. It just showed that it's paying attention, that it's ready. And I like those little reassurances that you get from a system like this. And one of the things that I really like about this system is it does a very good job of lane centering. So there's no real pinging from side to side. And it also takes into account the vehicle in front of you, but doesn't necessarily use that as gospel. So even though the vehicle in front of me right now is drifting towards the right side of the lane, the i7 is parked dead in the middle. This system will also do automatic lane changes. So if I want to move over here, I just bump the stock once to the left. It checks, and slides me over here, into the lane. Very clean system. It doesn't shoot really tiny gaps. So if you want to be more aggressive, you're going to have to take control. But in a situation like that, where you have a good amount of space, it executes the lane change very quickly and very smoothly. One of the things that is cool about this system is that I feel like it fits this vehicle really well. And that it makes the whole experience feel even more luxurious if the car is handling these things for you without any trouble. We've noticed in our testing-- [DING] Oh. So the system deactivated there, for a second. I was very close to a semi that was drifting over towards my lane. Once the system detected that, it actually asked me to take control of the vehicle yet again. I like that. I think that if the computer gets confused as to what's happening around it or if something encroaches on its environment, that it prompts the driver to take over. It also did so via chime there, that was very easy to see. And the green lights turned off. They might be hands-free, but they're definitely not brain free. Now this system is part of an advanced driver assistance package from BMW. And it costs $2,100 on this vehicle. But for 2024, the price of that package actually went up to $2,500. And it also requires you to add another options package. So it puts you in for about $4,000 total. But the nice thing about it is, it's not a subscription. So once you buy it on the i7, it's yours forever. Overall, I would say that I like this BMW system a lot. And I also really like the fact that you don't have to keep paying for it. You just pay for it once, and you're done. BMW has gotten flak for charging subscriptions for things. But weirdly, they haven't mentioned any sort of subscription pricing for this. So it's nice that if you buy the i7, you'll get this Level 2+ system for the life of the vehicle. I'm here in the 2024 Cadillac CT5-V. And this is outfitted with GM's hands-free system, which is called Super Cruise. Super Cruise, like the other systems, only works on mapped highways and divided highways. And right now, GM's system of mapped highways around the country covers 400,000 miles. So that's a lot of freeway. Most of your major freeways will definitely be covered by this system. Super Cruise uses a combination of radar and cameras, as well as a navigation system, to tell when you're on one of the mapped highways. And then when those conditions are all met, you can use Super Cruise. It also works from 0 miles an hour all the way up to past highway speeds. So to activate Super Cruise, I'm going to activate first, the adaptive cruise control. And then I'm going to hit this other button here, on the steering wheel. And then as you can see, a green light will appear here, on the steering wheel. And inside the cluster, you'll also get a steering wheel that glows green as well. As long as this light stays green, I know if the vehicle is in hands-free mode. If it changes to another color like blue or starts to flash red, that means that the vehicle really wants me to resume control here. Oh, that was aggressive. [LAUGHS] So right now, we're in a little bit of traffic. But my speed is set right at the speed limit, at 65. And what Super Cruise is actually doing is looking around me and trying to figure out if it moves into another lane, if that would be faster. One of the things that we've noticed, in testing this system, is that it's pretty aggressive. It moves around a lot. It doesn't really have a ton of foresight, it seems like. It's just always going to try to pick the faster lane around you. So someone was driving behind me, they would think, oh, that guy's kind of aggressive. I understand what the system is doing. It's really just trying to do anything it can to maintain that speed that you set it at. This is an option that you can turn off in the Infotainment if you don't like it. We have it on right now so we can test it. And it does bounce around a bit more than I would like for my tastes. But it is cool that the system can do this. Here in traffic, Super Cruise also seems to be doing pretty well. The vehicle in front of me right now is actually driving out of the right lane. But my vehicle seems pretty well centered in its lane. So it's ignoring the bad driving from the car in front of me, which I like. These systems all seem to really have the fundamentals nailed down. If you're in any kind of normal traffic conditions, anything between, I would say, 30 and 70 miles an hour, all these systems seem to perform pretty well. I'm going to try to execute a lane change, here. It didn't allow me to execute that lane change, I think because we're going too slow. Automatic lane changes usually only work above a certain speed threshold in these systems because changing lanes at lower speed is actually more dangerous. And you have to shoot smaller gaps than you would on an open highway. So because of that, I'm going to take over myself, execute this lane change, and continue on. Once the lane change was over, Super Cruise snapped back on right away, which is something that I really like, as well. The system seems to try to stay on as much as possible and keep you in this hands-free mode. And I really like that. One thing that is nice is if I do tap the brake to resume control of the system myself, I get a little vibration in the seat. And then a little red light flashes on the steering wheel, just to make sure that I know that I'm taking control. There's not really a big auditory warning. But I think that's enough to really tell you that the car wants you to take over, especially the vibration in the seat. Ooh, another automatic lane change. Nicely-- oh, no, we gave up again. Oh, this system is not doing so well in the auto lane changes today. It definitely had a gap there it could have shot, but it chose not to. But the weird thing is, it actually goes about halfway and then decides to change its mind after that. So it looks like I'm like, oh, no, did it again. So if you're behind me, driving, you see a turn signal, you see me go halfway in the lane and then come back. I really don't like that. I think that if I were to be driving the system more consistently, I would turn off the auto lane change and feel more confident about picking lanes myself. I do like that the instrument cluster is pretty communicative with you about what the system is seeing. So for example, when I initiated that lane change myself, it tells me that it's looking for an opening, with a little icon and shows the car trying to move over. And that's an important feature of these systems, is how well they can actually communicate with the driver to either retake control, to tell the driver that the vehicle knows what's going on. And again, once you're more confident in how these systems operate and that they can operate safely, you're able to relax more. And it actually lower the amount of fatigue you have. So ultimately, what these features do is they make you less tired as a driver. And the more aware, awake, and attentive you are as a driver, the safer driver you are. Now, how much does Super Cruise cost? Here, on the CT5-V, there's a couple different Super Cruise packages. But the cheapest way to add it is to add the $3,700 Super Cruise 1 package. But that also requires you to add some other options packages, which means your all-in cost for the system on this vehicle is about $6,000. Now that $6,000 doesn't buy you this subscription for life. That is good for a three-year trial of Super Cruise. And then after, that you're going to have to pay $25 a month if you want to keep using it. My overall impressions of Super Cruise are pretty positive. I do like that this light, here, is on the top of the steering wheel, to let me know when the system is active or not. I like that it also uses the seat vibrations. And the hand-offs seem pretty clean. And I like that when it prompts you to take over, it tells you, in the cluster, the reasons why. But downsides would be that the automatic lane changes feel a bit gimmicky to me. They don't really accomplish what you're wanting to have happen. And there were several times, as we just saw, where it tries to change lanes and then goes, oh, maybe not, and then gets back in. And if I were to be driving behind someone on the road who was doing that, always signaling three times, maybe changing lanes, and scooting back in, I'd be very confused. CLINT: All right, everybody. Welcome back to our long-term test car, the 2020 Tesla Model Y, that is equipped with FSD, or Full Self-Driving beta. And I'm now going to tell you that Full Self-Driving is a silly name because this is the only car that actually doesn't do hands-free driving. This car requires you to keep your hands on the steering wheel even when all of its systems are activated. So that's what we're going to be doing today. So right now, I'm doing the old fashioned 9 and 3. And I'm applying a little bit of pressure. If I were to take my hands off, which I'm not going to do because that's inappropriate, the system will ask you to apply pressure and make sure you're there. And if you ignore it, if you keep your hands off of the steering wheel, it will take away the Autosteer capability. And in a really severe case, it will tell you, hey, you can only do this so many more times before we take away your FSD altogether. It'll just take it away. If you keep violating the system and you choose not to put your hands back on the wheel, boom, you'll lose your privileges, go to Tesla jail. ["LAW AND ORDER" CHIME] Activating Autopilot, or FSD in this case, is as easy as it gets. It's just the right-hand stalk on the steering wheel-- [BLOOP] --two presses down, and we're on the move. Also going to give our full beta visualization on the screen, so we can see what's going on. Super cool, actually. You can see in real-time what the car is seeing, including all the things around it. Let's talk about price for a second. FSD is not cheap, especially for something that Tesla says is in its beta form. If you were to buy a new Tesla, this will cost you $12,000. It's double the price of the Autopilot system. And that's nuts. You can also pay monthly if you choose. What we're doing right now is, we're on the 405 freeway. And we're heading back to Edmunds HQ in Santa Monica. The difference is going to be, with this car versus the other ones we're testing, this will keep the system activated off of the freeway. It'll actually work on the streets, as well. What I've learned in testing the Autopilot system with Tesla is it's really, really good up until the moment it's not. Now we've all seen those clips on TikTok and on YouTube of the cars just going crazy and deciding to do something they shouldn't be doing. I will say, when you're on the highway in a situation like this, the same situation we're using for the rest of the cars, Autopilot is very good. Keep your hands on the wheel. It stays in the lanes. It's actually really good at doing lane changes too. You can choose to select when you want it to change lanes. Or it'll even do it on its own, if it sees that there's an opening in traffic, that'll get you somewhere quicker. Here's the real test. This is a lane where everybody's merging in together. We're going to start to pick up highway speeds. So let's see how the car handles the merging situation. There are cars in front of me, behind me, to the side of me. Let's hope it doesn't cut anybody off. We're dead even with the Civic right now. Who's going to win? That was very well done. That was the best of any car all day. OK, the care is now deciding that it wants to change lanes. I didn't do anything with that. It's changing lanes all on its own, to start driving faster. It's noticing that the traffic is moving quicker to my left and is going to try to get us into the quicker-moving lanes. It's doing it again. It's another area where I've got to say, Autopilot is top of the pile. When it comes to lane changes, the car will identify it's time to make one, and do it all on its own. It's assertive but not over aggressive. It seems to know how do it pretty well. This is where things are about to pick up in intensity because we are getting off the highway. I do this for you people. I do this for you. All right, uncharted territory for this test now. The Tesla is the only car that will keep its systems activated off the highway. Here's test number one, stopping for a stop sign. It handled itself really well, even went around a bus. This, I got to say, is a little off-putting. The car is putting on its blinker. It's now making a turn, rather sketchy, if I might add, not very smooth, but still does it. Now it puts on its other blinker, is reading the traffic, and for all intents and purposes, is driving. I want to be clear, I'm driving. But at the same time, the car is basically doing everything. I'm just having to pay attention. That's a new situation. This is crazy for the industry, that Tesla actually lets this happen, and that the car is capable of doing it at this point. It's a whole different argument of whether or not it's appropriate for the car to be doing this right now, and how they get away with it. But the simple fact that it can do what it's doing is worth acknowledging is pretty cool. Trust the robots, Clint. Trust the robots. All right, this is your time. [BLINKER CLICKING] Here we go. There's some more braking. I will say, that's definitely the downside of FSD on the road. When it comes to turning and it comes to abrupt stopping, it could definitely get smoother. That's the very obvious point of where it's not as good as a driver. Here's the next obstacle. We have traffic in both directions. And it wants us to go across the street right now. We're either going to be here for 3 and 1/2 days, or it's going to do something I don't want it to do. I have no idea why it's letting us do this. OK, it's creeping up, just like I would. Oh, I don't like this. Traffic dies down. This should be your time, car. It's paralyzed. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. We're now very close to in the street and-- OK, yeah, we're hanging out in the road now. This is not cool. OK, now we are actually in the road. And it did it. It did it in the end. But I didn't like how far it moved out in front. Maybe blame that on me more than the car. But something about that just didn't feel right. Here we are. We're back at the office. So this has done something that the other cars have not. This got us all the way back to the office, including off the highway. It brought us back to our destination. It's not a hands-free system, but damn, it's pretty impressive. We've also been driving the Nissan ARIYA this week. But-- BRIAN WONG: We found that ProPILOT 2.0, while good, not quite as good as these other systems. So it didn't quite make the cut for this video. CLINT: Maybe next time. So the most advanced system here, also the scariest system here. Tesla gets fourth place because why? You can't win a hands-free driving test-- BRIAN WONG: If you don't have hands-free driving. The Tesla was the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. When we like the highway experience on the Tesla the most, potentially, out of all these vehicles. But on the street, it has ambition. But it kind of falls short at stop signs, red lights. Those things are all hard to really program for. And the Tesla tries. We applaud its ambition. But not quite there yet. CLINT: The FSD story is not over. The next version of it is no longer beta, whatever that means. So like our tech bro friends like to say, watch this space. BRIAN WONG: That means that among our hands-free systems, the Ford is going to come in third with its BlueCruise. And Clint, before this test, you thought that the Ford was probably going to win this thing. CLINT: Straight up. And then I drove it all throughout this week, and it tried to hurt me, not once, not twice, but three different times. They need to get this lane-change thing dialed in just a bit better. It's not there yet. BRIAN WONG: The other thing that we don't like about the Ford is that it's not very good at communicating. So it has this thin instrument cluster behind the wheel. And when it wants you to take control, there are some very small graphical changes, but there aren't always audible warnings. So there can be times where the vehicle wants you to resume taking steering control and you don't even know it. So you up with this gray area, where you think that the car is driving, the car thinks you're driving, and in reality, nobody's driving. CLINT: But like Tesla, Ford has made a lot of improvements there. They're not done yet. Remind me real quick, the giant, long, German name for this system? BRIAN WONG: Ah, that would be Assist Plus with Highway Assistant. And so for the BMW, the thing that we really liked is how smooth it was. So it speeds up smoothly, it slows down smoothly, it changes lanes smoothly. And that really fits the character of the i7. It makes it feel even more luxurious than it already is. And that's hard to do. CLINT: I can't believe I'm saying this, but it felt a little bit too cautious. There were times where I felt like I was holding up traffic on the highway because the car just had to figure it out. Go a little faster. Go a little faster. BRIAN WONG: Yeah, the system is definitely conservative when it comes to safety, maybe too conservative. But one system that was definitely not conservative is Super Cruise, in the GM. And that's here, in the CT5-V. And this is our winner. Those auto lane changes, probably too aggressive. But you can turn those off. And once those are off, super smooth, really good system, did everything we wanted it to do. CLINT: When you're giving up control to the car, you want to feel calm and relaxed and like everything is taken care of. And everything about Super Cruise keeps you calm, as the driver. That's why it's our favorite. BRIAN WONG: And unlike the Ford, very communicative. You have this-- it's part in the instrument cluster, where it tells you if it's going to turn off, why it turned off. You have this nice light on the steering wheel, that's in your field of vision, so that if it's going to turn off, it glows red instead of green. You know immediately, I need to take control of the vehicle again. The handoff from car to driver is best executed with Super Cruise in this Cadillac. And that's, in part, why it's our winner. CLINT: I got to say this, though. These are hands-free systems, not attention free. And at one point or another, all four of these cars were straight-up sketchy during our testing. BRIAN WONG: Yeah, each of them had a moment where we were like, we don't know what the car is doing. We'll call it oopsie moment. But it's also like where the car really needed us to jump in and be available to take control again, to make sure that we avoided a collision or slowed down. And yeah, that's just a reminder that these level-two systems, within one second, they really need you to be ready to take control again, of the vehicle. So you need to have your hands available, you need to have your eyes available, to be ready to really resume driving in an instant. CLINT: But the times, they are changing. BRIAN WONG: And a level-three system, not so far away. [GASPS] CLINT: Easiest way to tell Brian Wong has been driving a vehicle? He leaves a trace. Spending time on the 405, not fun. Not having to use your hands while doing it, more fun. BRIAN WONG: I feel like ours is going to be better than Clint's. Don't tell him I said that.