Chevrolet Equinox EV: hands-free for the rest of us
A billion hands-free miles, three quarters of a million cars, and a $34,995 Chevrolet that drives itself on the highway. Super Cruise is the only hands-free system that has genuinely scaled down — if you can find the option box.
Super Cruise is the only hands-free system in the world that has genuinely scaled down-market. Three quarters of a million GM vehicles now carry it across more than twenty models and four brands; they have driven a billion miles hands-free, half of that in the last twelve months alone, and more than half of owners use it every week. It has never, GM says, been attributed a crash. And it is available on this — a $34,995 Chevrolet crossover with 319 miles of range — which is the closest anyone has come to making hands-free driving an ordinary feature of an ordinary car.
Then you look at the invoice. Super Cruise is not standard on any Equinox EV; it is $3,355, bundled into a package. Three years of service are included, after which the bill becomes $39.99 a month, or $3,000 for an eight-year extension. On the cheaper Bolt it is worse: $3,255 for the feature, but gated behind mandatory packages that push the real cost to $4,450 on the RS and nearly $5,000 on the LT — a seventeen per cent price rise on the cheapest electric car in America, which did not offer it at launch at all and only became orderable with it in May.
Cumulative hands-free miles driven by GM customers, passed in April — 7.1 million hours across 28.7 million trips, averaging 24 minutes of hands-free driving per trip. No rival is within an order of magnitude.
The autonomy
What you are buying is the most conservative and best-behaved hands-free system on sale. GM lidar-scans roads in advance and lets the car drive itself only where the map is trusted — 750,000 miles of North American highway, surveyed by a dedicated fleet of vehicles costing well into six figures each. Off the network it simply declines. The IIHS rated it Marginal on safeguards, which sounds damning until you see that eleven of the fourteen systems tested rated Poor and Super Cruise was the only one meeting every emergency-procedure requirement. The critique that matters is structural: a system whose coverage depends on a survey fleet spends more of that fleet maintaining old maps the bigger it gets. And the eyes-off future GM has promised for 2028 — lidar, NVIDIA Thor, a centralised computer — runs on hardware that is not in this car and cannot be added to it. Meanwhile GM has written down $10.9 billion against its electric-vehicle business, Equinox EV sales fell 41 per cent in the first half of the year once the federal tax credit died, and Super Cruise revenue rose about seventy per cent.
"GM has democratised hands-free driving and kept autonomy for the Cadillacs. The Equinox can drive itself on the highway; it will never drive itself while you read."
What we're watching
- The subscription cliff: three years free, then $39.99 a month. GM says 30–40 per cent renew; it wants $2 billion a year from this.
- Whether eyes-off ever reaches a Chevrolet, and how fast. Mary Barra promises a rollout "much, much faster" than Super Cruise's eight years.
- The map problem — 750,000 miles surveyed by a fleet that must also keep them current.
Spec sheet — Chevrolet Equinox EV (2027)
The ai.cars verdict
- Hands-free driving in a $34,995 crossover — nobody else has brought this technology down to this price.
- A billion customer miles and no crash attributed to the system: the strongest safety record in hands-free driving.
- It is an option, not a feature: $3,355 here, effectively $4,450–$4,950 on the Bolt, then $39.99 a month from year four.
- The 2028 eyes-off hardware isn't in this car and can't be retrofitted — that future is being sold to Cadillac first.
- Verdict: the best-value hands-free car in the world, and a lesson in how carefully GM has priced the ladder above it.
How does it stack up? Compare the Equinox EV with the Ford Mustang Mach-E, or build your own comparison.
