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Ford s hands-free BlueCruise chases Tesla Autopilot and GM Super Cruise
Ford will begin offering its new BlueCruise hands-free highway driving system to customers later this year. The system is seen here in the Ford F-150. (Eric Perry/Ford/TNS)
Driver s-eye view of the BlueCruise hands-free display on a Ford Mustang Mach-E. (Ford/TNS)
Following the lead of Tesla Inc.âs Autopilot and General Motors Co.âs Super Cruise, Ford Motor Co. has telegraphed a semi-autonomous, active-drive-assist feature available with its 2021 Ford F-150 pickup and electric Mustang Mach-E.
Now that system has a name: BlueCruise. Blue as in the colorful highlights in the instrument panel that indicate BlueCruise is available for hands-free driving on 100,000 miles of divided highways that Ford has mapped across North America. The feature, now available for purchase, will be activated by an over-the-air update on properly-equipped vehicles in the third quarter of this year.
While details are still emerging, the Ford system aims to play in the same space as Autopilot and Super Cruise. U.S. manufacturers have taken the lead in semi-autonomous systems with a view towards fully-autonomous, so-called Level 5, vehicles. For now, systems like BlueCruise are Level 2 grade, requiring driver attention.
Long road trip shows that self-driving Ford F-150 can provide a much less stressful driving experience equipmentworld.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from equipmentworld.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
by Jake LingemanTechnology
The company has clocked more than 100,000 miles in real world testing.
Tesla has Full-Self Driving, Cadillac has Super Cruise, and now Ford has proven its own hand-free driving system, calling it BlueCruise. Ford put a half-million miles of development testing into the system, and just finished another 110,000-mile journey to test the system in the real world. It called the test, the Mother of All Road Trips; it included five F-150s, five Mach-Es, and covered 37 states plus five Canadian provinces.
The tech isn t available yet, but if you have a 2021 Ford F-150 or a Mustang Mach-E, and picked the Ford CoPilot 360 Active 2.0 Prep Package, you ll be receiving Blue Cruise through an over-the-air update later this year. Like Cadillac s system, BlueCruise will only work on prequalified highways Ford is calling Hands-Free Blue Zones that cover more than 100,000 miles in North America.
Ford Tests Self-Driving Software on ‘Mother of All Road Trips’
5 hours ago
Ford is laying down the gauntlet in the self-driving arena, declaring its BlueCruise software has completed the “Mother of All Road Trips.”
Self-driving vehicles are the next great frontier for the automotive industry. Virtually all of the major players are working on self-driving and autonomous driving systems. Ford is working on its self-driving software, BlueCruise, and has even gone so far as to call Tesla’s competing system vaporware.
BlueCruise is a Level 2 technology. Autonomous driving is rated on a scale of 0 to 5, with 0 being fully manual and 5 requiring no human control whatsoever.