Super Cruise is designed only for use on the highway, to "ease the driver's workload."

Cadillac 
Nominally an improvement on adaptive cruise control, Super Cruise is actually a more sophisticated system that uses a camera communicating with the car's GPS to "see" the road ahead. It goes one step further than currently available systems, however, automatically centering the vehicle in the lane using its electric power steering system. Unlike other active lane-departure systems that use a car's brakes to help prevent it from veering off the road, the system General Motors is developing allows for precisely setting the vehicle's position within the lane. The test mule we sampled had steering-wheel-mounted buttons that would allow you to "nudge" the car from side to side by a foot at a time without upsetting its course. Super Cruise also communicates with the vehicle's other active safety systems to help prevent and mitigate crashes.

 

Super Cruise is designed only for use on the highway, to "ease the driver's workload," with drivers still required to steer in city traffic and for more complicated maneuvers like passing. GM officials acknowledged the difficulty in deploying a system like this, a technology that if used improperly may encourage inattentive driving. Supposedly the system will only be functional under the specific circumstances for which it is designed, much like today's in-car entertainment systems will not play video on the front screen unless a vehicle is in Park. Currently the system is somewhat limited by external factors, like weather and the need for distinct lane markings. If visibility is low or the road doesn't have at least one clear lane demarcation, Super Cruise won't function. However, GM says it will improve the vision abilities of the system as it readies the technology for the marketplace.

GM says that Super Cruise could be introduced into production vehicles in just a few years, "by mid-decade." While on the one hand, its ability to help improve the safety of our roads is laudable, we can't help but express our frustration at the march of technology headed inevitably towards removing the physical act of driving from the motoring equation.

Scroll down to watch some video of us aboard the Super Cruise-equipped test mule and read the full press release.

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Woman racing driver dies in high-speed crash at Goodward

Sandra Harrison-Moore, 37, lost control of her classic sports car and crashed into the tyre wall during a time-trial event. She was airlifted to hospital with head injuries after the accident, at 2.50pm on Saturday, but doctors were unable to save her. Mrs Harrison-Moore, from Milton Keynes, Bucks, had been racing a Caterham sports car in a sprint event at Goodwood in Chichester, West Sussex. It is understood that she raced the L7-2 Caterham Roadsport 1800 car regularly with her husband, Simon, 48, and has competed in similar events across the country as a hobby. Preliminary investigations into the crash have established that no other vehicle was involved, but it is not yet clear why Mrs Harrison-Moore lost control. She was treated at the scene by paramedics and taken to Southampton General Hospital, where she died on Saturday night.

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Tushek Renovatio T500

It's been almost a fortnight, which just might be a record, since we last visited a previously unheard-of supercar-maker. Next up to keep the high-po exotic ball in play is Tushek Supercars, hailing from Slovenia (that's here), with its quaintly archaically named Forego T700. The company just made an appearance at the Top Marques Monaco with its first car, the 444-horsepower Renovatio T500 (pictured in our gallery below) with a modular hardtop, but the T700 will push things much further.

Founder Aljosa Tushek told Autocar the T700's targets: less than 2,200 pounds, more than 700 horsepower,up to 3.3gs for cornering. That latter number sounds like a math error would not only double the Renovatio's number, it would triple the cornering force sustained by the Lamborghini Aventador around the Nardo test track.

The limited-to-30-units Renovatio is priced at £245,000 ($394,934 U.S.) with deliveries promised later this year. Due in 2013, you can expect the T700 to outdo the T500's price by at least double as well, and you can expect both of them to never be sold in the U.S.

RELATED GALLERYTushek Renovatio T500

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Flying car aims to soar in the commercial market

The Jetsons had one, and Fred MacMurray flew one in "Flubber." Novelist Ian Fleming included one in his children's book "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." James Bond's nemesis Francisco Scaramanga used one as a getaway vehicle in the film "The Man With the Golden Gun." Now, a Massachusetts company hopes to commercially market a flying car — although "driving plane" might be a more accurate description. At last week's New York International Auto Show, Terrafugia Inc. of Woburn, Mass., unveiled the Transition, a two-seat aircraft with foldable wings. Pending regulatory approvals — which by no means are assured — the company plans to sell the contraption by 2013 for $279,000. "You can pull out of your garage, fill up with 91 octane at a gas station, drive to the nearest airport, unfold your wings, perform a preflight check and take off," said Terrafugia Chief Executive Carl Dietrich. So far, he said, about 100 people have put down $10,000 deposits to be among the first buyers. The idea of a flying car may seem like a pipe dream, but the company says modern technology, such as GPS devices, air bags and high-strength composite material, has made the Transition safer for the consumer. The company even offers a vehicle parachute system. Terrafugia is an aerospace company founded by pilots and engineers from MIT. The company name is Latin for "escape the earth." Terrafugia now has 24 employees. Dietrich said he had dreamed of developing the technology ever since childhood when he saw George Jetson zoom to and from his job at Spacely Space Sprockets in a flying car on the television cartoon show "The Jetsons." It became a reality last month, when a production prototype of the Transition completed its first successful flight for eight minutes at Plattsburgh International Airport in Plattsburgh, N.Y. Terrafugia isn't the first company to try to get a car off the ground. For more than a century, daredevil aviators and freethinking engineers have attempted the concept. But the development of a flying car — some even backed with well-heeled resources and financing — has been fraught with disappointments. American aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss, who designed the aluminum Autoplane in 1917, is often credited as the inventor of the flying car. While it was capable of short bunny hops, it never could achieve sustained flight. Later in 1926, Henry Ford introduced a 15-foot-long aircraft he dubbed the "Model T of the Air," the Ford Flivver. The single-seat midget plane was flown by just two men: Charles Lindbergh and test pilot Harry Brooks. Ford stopped production on the Flivver after building three or four, according to a website from the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., after Brooks crashed and died in the ocean off the coast of Melbourne, Fla. The ConvAirCar flew for more than an hour above San Diego in 1947. Designer Henry Dreyfuss bolted a 36-foot wing and an aircraft engine onto a four-seat fiberglass car body for aviation company Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corp. But it, too, was canceled after a fatal crash. In the 1970s, Henry Smolinski of Oxnard grabbed a Cessna Skymaster wing and attached it to a Ford Pinto and called it the Mizar. During a test flight in 1973, he and the pilot died. "Yeah, the track record isn't so good," said Leslie Kendall, curator of the Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. "If something goes wrong on your car, you can ease to the side of the road — not so much if something goes wrong in the air." Kendall pointed out, however, that in the 1930s, Santa Monica engineer Waldo Waterman successfully designed a small plane with a transmission drive system that operated the propeller in the air and the rear wheels on the ground. The Aerobile had automobile parts from companies such as Studebaker and Ford to keep the price down. According to the website for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where the Aerobile currently hangs, it received Federal Aviation Administration certification in the experimental category in 1957, but a market for the vehicle never materialized. The Taylor Aerocar was another prototype that was certified for flight in 1956.

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Congress wants all cars to be equipped with recording devices

The federal government is about to become the country’s worst backseat driver. Congress wants to put tracking devices in the car of every American, and that’s not even the scariest provision in a new bill being passed around Washington. The US Senate has already signed off on a new legislation that, if cleared by the rest of Congress, will see to it that the government gets its eyes and ears inside every automobile in the country. Senate Bill 1813 calls for the installation of mandatory recorders and communication devices in Americans’ cars that could connect the whereabouts and actions of the country’s drivers with whomever the government wants to grant access to. It doesn’t stop there, though — another provision in the proposed bill will give the government the power to revoke passports from Americans behind on their taxes, essentially making it impossible for the indebted to escape the country. It’s being touted around the capital as the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, or MAP-21, and Congress is considering it under the explanation that the bill will “reauthorize Federal-aid highway and highway safety construction programs.” In the abstract drafted on Capitol Hill, however, the act is described as having provisions necessary “for other purposes.” And while no lawmakers explicitly explain the benefits of some questionable content within MAP-21, what the government could get away with if the bill is passed is something eerily Orwellian. If you’re not scared yet, then here is another eye opener: the US Senate has already approved the bill by an overwhelming vote of 74-22, leaving only the House of Representatives to vote in favor before government-sanctioned blackboxes become as common as carburetors and calibrated friction brakes. At this rate, it won’t be long before every Beetle and Buick in the country is being tracked by Big Brother. Section 53006 of MAP-21 calls for a “vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications systems” deployed in the country’s cars in the near future. A copy of the bill is available online, but it isn’t until the bottom of the text that things start to get creepy. That section calls on several congressional committees — including the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure of the House of Representatives — to hear in three years’ time arguments in favor of the deployment of the communications system in question. At that point, a designated person will be asked to recommend an “implementation path for dedicated short-range communications technology and applications,” which includes “guidance on the relationship of the proposed deployment of dedicated short-range communications to the National ITS Architecture and ITS Standards.” Sending short-wave signals to other automobiles and data hubs is one thing, but the act is also asking for mandatory event data recorders in every car. That’s the actual name, in fact, of what Congress says they want every car to have in the very near future. “Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall revise part 563 of title 49, Code of Federal Regulations, to require, beginning with model year 2015, that new passenger motor vehicles sold in the United States be equipped with an event data recorder that meets the requirements under that part,” explains the act. The section goes on to establish that the ownership of data collected by those devices will be the sole property of the owner of the automobile, but other provisions clearly authorize a challenge to this. A court may be granted access to that information “in furtherance of a legal proceeding,” and elsewhere in the bill it says that “the information is retrieved pursuant to an investigation or inspection authorized under section 1131(a) or 30166 of title 49, United States Code.” Two years after those devices are made mandatory, Congress will also hear a report that will explain “the recommendations on what, if any, additional data the event data recorder should be modified to record.” Those without drivers licenses won’t be spared from civil liberty infringement if MAP-21 makes it out of the White House with Obama’s approval— another section says that Congress can confiscate the passports of Americans delinquent in paying their taxes. Although the US was built from the ground up by refugees escaping persecution, persons plagued by hardships in the near future won’t be afforded that same ability to escape Uncle Sam’s strengthening stranglehold. Under Section 40304, the US State Department is allowed the powers to revoke passports from anyone determined by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) of having “a delinquent tax debt in an amount in excess of $50,000.” Fifty-grand might seem like a big number for 99-percenters, but it isn’t all that outrageous or uncommon. After all, the Washington Post reported in 2010 that out of the 18,000 employees on Capitol Hill, 638 of them were behind on their taxes. What’s more, though, is that of those working within the House of Representatives, the average delinquent was indebted to the country to the tune of $15,498. "If you're on the federal payroll and you're not paying your taxes, you should be fired," Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) exclaimed at the time. Two years down the road, though, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nevada) is requesting that a citizen’s ability to travel abroad be brought to an end for being behind on their taxes. Reid was the author of Section 40304 and is presumably outside of the 4 percent of congressional staffers that owed the feds in 2010, but opponents of the act are saying that stripping passports from poor Americans isn’t a provision that is necessary for MAP-21. “It takes away your right to enter or exit the country based upon a non-judicial IRS determination that you owe taxes,” constitutional attorney Angel Reyes tells Fox Business. “It’s a scary thought that our congressional representatives want to give the IRS the power to detain US citizens over taxes, which could very well be in dispute.” “There are so many people that fall into that situation, and I think that’s too invasive. Especially coming out of a bad economy there are a lot of people behind on a lot of things,” adds financial adviser Clark Hodges to Fox. There are other damning provisions in MAP-21, including a “Stop Taxhaven Abuse” section that says the government can kick any foreign jurisdiction out of the US financial system if it wants to. For American residents up to date on their income taxes and not invested abroad, however, the real dangers lie within the very real possibility that the government will soon be able to track every single automobile on the nation’s roads. Earlier this year, the US Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement requires a warrant if they want to install GPS tracking devices on the cars of suspected criminals, but with that decision quickly collecting opposition, a loophole might have just been brought to light by forcing consumers to purchase cars with tracking systems already installed. Before the Supreme Court shot down the feds’ plea to allow unwarranted monitoring of automobiles in January, Justice Stephen Breyer said that a decision to not do so would be dangerous for everyone in the country. "If you win this case then there is nothing to prevent the police or the government from monitoring 24 hours a day the public movement of every citizen of the United States. … So if you win, you suddenly produce what sounds like '1984',"explained Breyer.

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New fuel panic fears: Strike threat returns as pay deal is rejected by tanker drivers

Fears of a national fuel strike returned today after tanker drivers overwhelmingly rejected a deal thrashed out with bosses. Unite union officials said the terms of the agreement drawn up last week did not go far enough. The union has until Friday to decide whether to call a strike. It will then have to give seven days notice of industrial action. Six days of talks brokered by the conciliation service Acas had resulted in a possible deal between Unite and the distribution firms. But it was thrown out when presented today to 60 representatives of drivers at seven haulage firms. Unite assistant general secretary Diana Holland said progress had been made on pensions and training. But she said the “sticking point” was firms sub-contracting out work to private firms which was undermining pay rates and job security. “While there has been some progress it is clear that our members need more guarantees and assurances from the employers about their commitment to meaningful minimum standards. “We remain committed to achieving a negotiated settlement that brings stability and security to a vital industry and gives this workforce, and the public, confidence that the race to the bottom is ending,” Ms Holland said. She added: “Delegates expressed concern that while important progress had been made on health, safety and training, proposals on maintaining standards, security of employment and sub-contracting do not give them the confidence that the problems gripping to industry would be addressed fully by employers. “For too long operators presided over under-cutting and the erosion of standards, this is simply not sustainable and it is beholden on all parties to work together to establish a meaningful set of minimum standards that bring order to a chaotic industry.” Unite represents 2,062 tanker drivers, covering 90% of supplies to forecourts. There was panic at the pumps before Easter after Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude told motorists to stockpile fuel in the event of a possible strike. Mrs Holland stressed today there was no need for drivers to panic. “Do not panic. It’s very clear we are not on strike. We feel we are able to reach a solution and we are determined to do so,” she said. She said Unite officials were in contact with Acas about restarting talks with bosses in the next few days. Peter Harwood Acas chief conciliator said: “Naturally, we are disappointed at today’s outcome, following the parties’ intensive talks at Acas over the last two weeks. We are contacting the parties and the challenge now is to see if we can find a way forward.” Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Davey said: “We are disappointed that an agreement has yet to be reached. "We understand that these are complex issues but urge both parties to work towards a negotiated resolution with the support of Acas. “The Government continues to believe that any strike action would be wrong and unnecessary.” Simon Walker of the Institute of Directors said: “The prospect of a fuel strike hanging over businesses is causing dreadful uncertainty, and we have already seen the kind of disruption that panic buying can cause. “It is very disappointing that the union has rejected this deal, and both parties must get back around the table to settle this dispute as soon as possible. “A strike would cost a huge amount of money, and cause disruption and misery for millions of people who have nothing to do with this argument.”

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Buckle up ... the Torana may be on its way back

CARMAKER Holden may be hatching a plan to bring back the legendary Torana. Wheels magazine says the idea of a new mid-sized, real-wheel-drive that captures the same spirit as its namesake, is germinating deep within the company as Holden contemplates the longer-term outlook for its manufacturing operations. The magazine says while the company recognises that its future lies with building front-wheel-drive vehicles, it is also conscious of its sporting, rear-drive heritage. It believes the concept of a new Torana lies in a localised version of a US model, the Chevrolet Code 130R, which was shown as a concept at the Detroit motor show in January.

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Lotus Technical Director James Allison says the team are currently assessing how much benefit their E20 could derive from a Mercedes-style 'double DRS' after their attempts to get the device outlawed failed. THE ONLY PLACE TO BE Sky Sports F1 HD is THE only place to watch the 2012 Formula One season in full. We will have live and exclusive coverage of the Bahrain Grand Prix starting with P1 on Friday.

Lotus: Now looking to see if they can benefit from a double DRS

The Enstone-based outfit lodged an official protest to FIA stewards on the Thursday of the Chinese Grand Prix weekend over the legality of Mercedes much-discussed system - which channels air through internal pipes from the rear of car to help stall the front wing when the DRS is activated - but the claim was thrown out by the governing body's representatives who were again happy that it was inside the regulations.

With Lotus having vowed not to take the issue on to the FIA's Court of Appeal, teams are now faced with the decision of whether or not to incorporate similar systems into their existing designs in order to gain the same apparent lap-time benefit Mercedes are enjoying in qualifying in particular, when DRS use is unrestricted

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Lewis Hamilton happy at McLaren but insists he will bide his time before signing a new deal

With three third-place finishes in three races this season, Hamilton, whose five-year contract expires at the end of this year, leads the drivers’ championship by two points from team-mate Jenson Button. But while he admits he wants to stay at Woking, his immediate focus is on turning those podium finishes into race wins. “I have no plans either way,” Hamilton said. “I don’t need persuading. "When I need to, which can be within any time frame I want so long as it is before next year, then I will decide about my future. But the team are doing fantastic. I could not be happier in the team.” Asked whether it would be hard to leave a team who have nurtured him since the age of 13, Hamilton added: “Yeah. I don’t feel like walking away. I’ve not sat down and thought about my future. I have just sat down and thought about this year.

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Ford to use all-electric car as NASCAR pace car at Richmond

Ford Motor Company will become the first manufacturer in NASCAR history to supply an all-electric car as the pace car. The new Focus Electric will lead the field at the April 28 Sprint Cup Series race at Richmond. "Ford research shows the majority of Americans would consider buying an electrified vehicle but do not yet understand the different technologies," Mark Fields, president of Ford's Americas division, said Monday. "Highlighting the Focus Electric as a pace car is a fun way to educate consumers about the kinds of benefits our electrified vehicles deliver and show people our commitment to provide Ford customers the power of choice for leading fuel economy in the vehicle that best meets their needs." The car will be unveiled to the public at the Virginia State Capitol on April 25. Ford also was the first to use a hybrid vehicle as pace car when the Fusion Hybrid led the field at Homestead in 2008. Ford in January unveiled its Fusion as its 2013 car to be used in NASCAR competition.

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