I am very bullish on the future of self-driving cars and think all the innovation happening in the space is extremely exciting. That being said, GM's newly announced Ultra Cruise sounds like another half-baked technology that will cause more stress than it solves for.
GM claims the technology will "enable hands-free driving in 95 percent of all driving scenarios." If that's true, that's very impressive and probably on-par with Tesla Autopilot and other similar offerings currently in-market. But what about that last 5%? How do you know when a driving scenario arises that Ultra Cruise can't cover? Do you as the driver have to sit on high-alert waiting for your car's brain to max out? If so, isn't that activity — driving hands-free while anxiously awaiting for Ultra Cruise to call into the bullpen — more stressful than just driving?
It's not that I think this is a dangerous or useless technology that GM should have held back. It has merit and is definitely a stepping stone to full autonomy. I'm just still skeptical of the use case for these halfway solutions.
Put another way: if you had a calculator that gave you that right answer 95% of the time, would you ever use it?
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