Review: Super Cruising in a 2024 Chevrolet Silverado

Chevrolet has given its Silverado lineup a broad range of powertrains, trim levels, and cab configurations to capture a huge swath of the pickup truck market. The Silverado’s current generation, first launched in 2019, continues to adapt and improve. We recently nabbed a highly optioned 1500 High Country to see how its newest tech stacks up.

The Silverado 1500 remains a very comfortable place to spend your time, with a roomy cabin for both rows of seats and a pleasant ride that shakes off poor pavement surfaces and isolates the driver and passengers from both road and wind noise. Even when equipped with the optional 22-inch wheels as our tester included, the ride quality was top-notch.

Since we’ve driven plenty of the current-generation Silverado in various trims, one of our top priorities was to experience Super Cruise hands-free driving. Our test drive coincided with a recent expansion of Super Cruise availability, as the compatibility now includes 750,000 miles of roads in the United States and Canada. Major freeways and highways were among the first to roll out, but the expansion now also includes smaller connecting highways.

We tried Super Cruise on some of Southern California’s biggest freeways as well as some of its smaller, windier ones. To use Super Cruise, the driver must first engage adaptive cruise control. That makes perfect sense, especially if you consider adaptive cruise control as the next step in driver assistance above standard cruise control, and then Super Cruise as its progression. If the vehicle is on a compatible highway, pressing the Super Cruise button on the steering wheel will start the system and inform the driver to keep their eyes on the road. A camera mounted on the steering column keeps tabs on the driver to ensure they’re paying attention. We drove during the day, at night, and in the rain, and Super Cruise was only stymied on a few occasions. One such example was a curving portion of a small, two-lane highway when we couldn’t engage Super Cruise even though the road appeared to be part of the system’s network. Instead, we were told that our speed, which was keeping up with the flow of traffic, was too great. Okay, we may have been over the speed limit, fair enough. Once we dropped our speed a bit, Super Cruise took the wheel.

We have to admit, we’re still getting used to the concept of hands-free driving. With just a few hours of experience, the process is a bit disconcerting. On straight sections, the vehicle’s course corrections match what you’d expect from a human driver. On curves, however, the minute steering corrections seem odd. The constant small adjustments happen about twice a second. Although these adjustments don’t look smooth, they don’t transmit to the occupants, either. It’s just that watching the adjustments of the wheel, you can almost picture a computer anxiously muttering to itself as it makes its way through a curve.

The one downside to Super Cruise is that it is very conservative. Of course, that’s how you’d hope it operates. However, when surrounded by other drivers who are assertive or even aggressive with their passing, Super Cruise’s automatic lane-change function can meet its match.

For example, when approaching a driver in the number two lane who is going under the speed limit when there’s no good reason to do so, Super Cruise will match that vehicle’s speed at a safe distance. Now two vehicles are driving slower than the flow of traffic, and everyone driving with the flow of traffic will make moves to get around them both. Despite the Silverado’s 420-hp V-8 and a responsive 10-speed transmission, Super Cruise will wait, left turn-signal blinking, looking for a large opening in traffic before initiating a lane change. The maneuver is aborted if anything fills whatever void that Super Cruise deems large enough to be safe for a lane change. All of this information is relayed via the driver information center dead ahead in the dash, so it’s not a surprise.

After a few of these aborted passes, however, we took over for Super Cruise, stomped on the gas, and easily made the pass. If we hadn’t intervened, normal traffic would have kept passing and Super Cruise would have been happy to follow at a safe distance behind the 55-mph rolling chicane. That said, it’s exactly how you’d hope a driver-assist system would function. Any driver-assist function naturally requires some sort of trust, and Super Cruise helps build that trust by being conservative and communicating with the driver.

With the speed, following distance, and course corrections handled by Super Cruise, the driver can focus on surrounding vehicles, upcoming traffic, and road hazards. For our short trips, Super Cruise remained a novelty. On longer trips, the ability to relax your shoulders, sit back, and delegate the monotonous course corrections to Super Cruise could help reduce fatigue and improve alertness.

Whether you trust an advanced driver-assistance system in your vehicle is up to you, but that could change over time. If GM’s Super Cruise, Ford’s Blue Cruise, and the like continue to improve with oversight that helps steer things along a safe course, perhaps many of those who resist the technology will be won over. We were once skeptical of adaptive cruise control, just as there once were those who scoffed at plain old cruise control when it was introduced.

2024 Chevrolet Silverado 1500 High Country

Highs: The Silverado remains roomy, comfortable, and powerful. Super Cruise expansion brings impressive coverage and an intuitive interface.

Lows: Luxurious High Country trim still plays second fiddle to its GMC Sierra Denali cousin.

Takeaway: The Silverado continues to impress, but with the pickup market stretching even more upscale, there’s probably room in the lineup to bring the High Country some flashier interior colors and luxury amenities. Super Cruise could help it win some customers.

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