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Ford wants to compete with GM’s Super Cruise by making its own hands-free highway driving system. To do this, it needs to do a lot of real-world tests. The automaker has said that it did the “mother of all road trips” last year to test its upcoming BlueCruise system. It did this by sending five Mustang Mach-E crossovers and five F-150 trucks on a 110,000-mile trip across the US and Canada.
No one was surprised that the goal was to see how BlueCruise worked in a variety of real-life road and traffic situations. Ford had already done development testing for 500,000 miles, but these were shorter, more focused dry runs. Ford used the cross-country trips to look for changes in everything from road signs to the weather.
BlueCruise will be available on 2021 Mustang Mach-E and F-150 models later in the second half of the year through a software update, but you’ll need the Co-Pilot360 Active 2.0 Prep Package. Like Super Cruise, it looks for “prequalified” parts of the highway and checks to see if you’re paying attention. You can really take your hands off the wheel, but you’ll need to be ready to take control if you leave a BlueCruise-ready area or run into a problem on the road.
You may have to pay for the feature. BlueCruise comes standard on the California Route 1, First Edition, and Premium trims levels of the Mustang Mach-E, and the F-150 Limited comes with the necessary Co-Pilot360 package. For every other owner, though, adding the hands-off mode will cost at least $600 plus the cost of the hardware. You might want to think about how often you drive on the highway to decide if Ford’s semi-autonomous technology is worth it.
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