GM has doubled Super Cruise: anyone want to *not* drive the Pacific Coast Highway?

Route 66, the Pacific Coast Highway, Route 1, the Trans-Canada. Roads you’ve wanted to drive since you heard about them, an irresistible mix of history, scenery and legendary stretches of blacktop. You’ve probably even picked out the cars you want to take: a Sixties Mustang on the mother road, a Shelby Cobra up the PCH, a drop-top Caddy through the Florida Keys, a suicide-door Lincoln Continental for the long stretches of Canadian highway.

Or, if you want, you can now take something like a Chevy Bolt (or maybe the super-subtle Hummer EV?) and... well, not drive at all.

It’s all thanks to GM’s ‘Super Cruise’ hands-free driving system, which uses GPS, lidar, radar and cameras to take the wheel on interstate highways. But now, GM says it’s rolling out Super Cruise on more roads, including Route 66, the PCH, Route 1 and the Trans-Canada.

Good news? Well, on the one hand driving is one of the last great freedoms any one of us has. In a single drive, you combine the freedom of choice, the freedom of movement and the freedom to make a tonne or two of metal move at speeds humans were never designed to achieve. An incredible privilege. To give that up in the name of convenience feels like winning the lottery and then letting someone else spend it because you can’t be bothered to go shopping.

Then again, you might just want to be free to take in the scenery from the comfort of the car, without having to concentrate on the road. Maybe you can’t just pull over and get out, and the idea of a coach tour sets your teeth on edge as badly as it does ours. We don’t for a second want to deny anyone the freedom of getting in a car and going where they want –the incredible personal autonomy that cars deliver forms the fundaments of that freedom. We just don’t want automotive autonomy to replace everything else a car can offer.

Or, to put it another way, we just want to be free to turn it off.