Cadillac Challenges Tesla With the Super Cruise Self-Driving System

If you're wondering why you don't have a self-driving car yet, you should know that you're part of the problem. When it comes to semi-autonomous systems--cars that do some of the driving, but leave the tricky stuff to humans--the biggest hurdle isn't the technical challenge of making a car safely drive itself. It's ensuring that you're alert and ready to grab the wheel if a sensor craps out, someone cuts you off, or any number of other sudden and random things happens. Engineers call this the handoff problem, and it's so tricky that companies like Ford and Google's Waymo have given up on partial autonomy because they figure it's easier to go straight to full autonomy and cut you out of the equation entirely. Tesla has done it pretty well with its Autopilot system, for example.