General Motors is adding more highways to its flagship hands-free technology Super Cruise, bringing the total to about 750,000 mi (1.2 million km) of compatible roads in the U.S. and Canada.

The latest expansion adds minor highways that typically connect smaller cities and townships, meaning drivers will soon be able to drive hands-free between more rural towns across the country. The company expects this to excite Super Cruise customers, particularly those with compatible trailers who camp, boat, and use recreational vehicles. In 2024, it is adding Super Cruise with trailering to models like the 2024 Chevrolet Traverse or 2024 GMC Acadia.

According to GM, safely deploying and expanding access to ADAS (advanced driver assistance system) technologies like Super Cruise is an important step in gaining consumer trust and excitement around the future of transportation. The new batch of compatible roads makes it the largest hands-free operating domain in North America—nearly six times the coverage of other hands-free driver assistance technologies on the market today.

“GM is all-in on safely deploying Super Cruise as we make the technology available on more vehicles, more roads, and for more people to enjoy,” said Anantha Kancherla, GM Vice President of ADAS. “A key part of that is expanding the road network—in this case nearly doubling it again—with lidar-mapped highways. High-precision lidar mapping gives us an operating domain where we are confident in Super Cruise’s abilities.”

Super Cruise launched in 2017 as the industry’s first hands-free ADAS on the market. GM has incrementally expanded its Super Cruise network, most recently in August 2022 to 400,000 mi (640,000 km), to include major Canadian, U.S., and state highways. A few notable routes with large sections coming online with that expansion were “The Mother Road” (U.S. Route 66), Pacific Coast Highway (CA Route 1), Overseas Highway (U.S. Route 1), and the Trans-Canada Highway.

The new roads have already started to be added incrementally over-the-air, at no additional charge, and will continue to be added through 2025. Most Super Cruise-equipped vehicles will receive this expansion except for the Cadillac CT6, Chevrolet Bolt EUV, and Cadillac XT6. The average eligible vehicle will update its map within about a month of the GM brand site maps showing updated roads.

General Motors says that over 80% of surveyed owners with Super Cruise have said it makes driving more relaxing, and it’s the second most important reason for choosing a vehicle. More than 160 million mi (257 million km) have been driven accident-free with Super Cruise.

New or enhanced features and capabilities since Super Cruise’s launch include lane change on demand and automatic lane change, enhanced navigation, industry-first, and only, hands-free trailering, collaborative steering, enhanced driver-requested offset, and improved curve handling.

In its latest testing results published in October, Consumer Reports (CR) ranks Super Cruise (from GM’s Cadillac brand) just behind Ford’s top-ranked BlueCruise system, with Mercedes-Benz Driver Assistance in third. After adding “active driving assistance (ADA) systems” from three other automakers—Jaguar Land Rover, Lucid, and Subaru—to its rankings and testing updated systems from Hyundai and Nissan, it has evaluated a total of 17 systems.

Tesla, once an innovator in ADA with its Autopilot system, remains in about the middle of the pack, with the new Nissan ProPILOT Assist 2.0 leapfrogging the EV maker. That’s because Tesla hasn’t changed Autopilot’s basic functionality much since it first came out, instead just adding more features to it, said Jake Fisher, CR’s Senior Director of Auto Testing.

“After all this time, Autopilot still doesn’t allow collaborative steering and doesn’t have an effective driver monitoring system,” he said, in October. “While other automakers have evolved their ACC and LCA systems, Tesla has simply fallen behind.”

CR opened its new $1 million ADA testing loop in spring 2023.