1979 Cadillac Coupe Deville 425 on 2040-cars

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GM intends to offer semi-autonomous vehicles by 2020

Prepare for a few years of technological saber-rattling, as the world's automakers begin pushing to bring self-driving cars to market. Earlier this week, Nissan announced that it aims to offer autonomous vehicles by 2020, while Google, BMW and several other marks are working on similar efforts.
General Motors is doing things differently, though. Rather than push for a fully autonomous car, it's continuing to refine its semi-autonomous Super Cruise, a product that we tested in April 2012 and that will eventually see use on some Cadillacs before trickling down to the rest of the General Motors family. Super Cruise, which is undergoing testing in the Cadillac SRX, doesn't take complete control out of the driver's hands. Rather, under a very specific set of circumstances on the freeway, it will marry the capabilities of things like lane departure warning and adaptive cruise control to allow the driver to take their hands off the wheel. All of which sounds a lot like the system Mercedes-Benz is launching on the 2014 S-Class.
The system is still in development, according to John Capp, GM's director of electrical controls and active safety technology. Now that that the biggest hurdle, steering control, has been cleared, GM's engineers can focus on things like teaching the system to adapt to differing road conditions and visibility levels. As we reported in 2012, Super Cruise is still befuddled in low-visibility situations or when road markings aren't particularly clear.

Here are a few of our automotive guilty pleasures

It goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway. The world is full of cars, and just about as many of them are bad as are good. It's pretty easy to pick which fall into each category after giving them a thorough walkaround and, more important, driving them. But every once in a while, an automobile straddles the line somehow between good and bad — it may be hideously overpriced and therefore a marketplace failure, it may be stupid quick in a straight line but handles like a drunken noodle, or it may have an interior that looks like it was made of a mess of injection-molded Legos. Heck, maybe all three. Yet there's something special about some bad cars that actually makes them likable. The idea for this list came to me while I was browsing classified ads for cars within a few hundred miles of my house. I ran across a few oddballs and shared them with the rest of the team in our online chat room. It turns out several of us have a few automotive guilty pleasures that we're willing to admit to. We'll call a few of 'em out here. Feel free to share some of your own in the comments below. Dodge Neon SRT4 and Caliber SRT4: The Neon was a passably good and plucky little city car when it debuted for the 1995 model year. The Caliber, which replaced the aging Neon and sought to replace its friendly marketing campaign with something more sinister, was panned from the very outset for its cheap interior furnishings, but at least offered some decent utility with its hatchback shape. What the two little front-wheel-drive Dodge models have in common are their rip-roarin' SRT variants, each powered by turbocharged 2.4-liter four-cylinder engines. Known for their propensity to light up their front tires under hard acceleration, the duo were legitimately quick and fun to drive with a fantastic turbo whoosh that called to mind the early days of turbo technology. — Consumer Editor Jeremy Korzeniewski  Chevrolet HHR SS: Chevy's HHR SS came out early in my automotive journalism career, and I have fond memories of the press launch (and having dinner with Bob Lutz) that included plenty of tire-smoking hard launches and demonstrations of the manual transmission's no-lift shift feature. The 260-horsepower turbocharged four-cylinder was and still is a spunky little engine that makes the retro-inspired HHR a fun little hot rod that works quite well as a fun little daily driver.

Junkyard Gem: 1967 Cadillac Fleetwood Sixty Special Sedan

If you lived in North America in 1967 and you wanted to show the neighbors you'd clawed your way to the peak of the success pyramid, only one car would do: Cadillac Fleetwood. Today's Junkyard Gem is 4,685 pounds of General Motors luxury hardware, finally knocked off the road at age 53 by an unfortunate wreck and now residing in a Denver self-service wrecking yard. The Cadillac brand endured some rough years during the 1970s and 1980s, but rode high during the 1960s. The Fleetwood Sixty Special Sedan started at $6,423 in 1967, or just over $50,000 when figured using inflation-adjusted 2020 dollars. A Mercedes-Benz 250SE sedan set you back $6,385 that year, but it weighed barely half as much and packed just 148 horses against the Cad's 340. Really, you had to get a genuine Rolls-Royce to out-swank the Fleetwood-driving Joneses back then (the Lincoln Continental and Imperial didn't have quite the snob appeal at that time), and the Roller cost more than several Fleetwoods combined. This car has been around during its long life. On the windshield, we see 1980 and 1981 parking stickers from the Keeneland Club in Kentucky. This car was already 13 years old by that time, but still very classy. At some point, the car must have migrated to California. Here's a U.C. Berkeley sticker. This ancient In-N-Out sticker comes from the Southern California-only era of the famous hamburger chain. Sometimes it's tough to determine the reasons that an old car ended up in a place like this, but that's not a problem here. Let's hope the car's occupants had their belts on (lap belts only in 1967, but still better than nothing), because these old Detroit land yachts didn't have much in the way of energy-absorbing crumple zones. The paint and interior are quite rough, so this car depreciated from being worth perhaps a couple of grand to scrap value in an instant.  Cruise control was a very rare option in 1967, and this car has it. The famous Fleetwood triple-tone horns were still there when I got to this car. Under the hood, 429 cubic inches (7.0 liters) of super-smooth Cadillac pushrod V8. This engine grew to 472 and then 500 cubic inches during the following few years. The paint shows some great patina. Did I buy the horns? Of course I bought the horns — I always bring my trusty lightweight junkyard toolbox when I head out to shoot some Junkyard Gems. Related Video: