Edmunds tests the best automotive hands-free driving systems

While fully automated vehicles are still a ways off, the stepping stone of hands-free driving technology has become prevalent in the past few years. These assist systems allow drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel in certain situations. Combined with automated braking and acceleration, the feature can help make driving long distances or in congested traffic easier and less fatiguing. To better explain what’s available, the automotive experts at Edmunds put four hands-free drive systems to the test: Ford’s BlueCruise, General Motors’ Super Cruise, Tesla’s AutoPilot with Full Self-Driving Beta and BMW’s Driving Assistant Plus.

Ford calls its hands-free driving system BlueCruise and offers it on a handful of its vehicles. BlueCruise allows for hands-free driving on most U.S. highways that don’t have traffic signals or intersections. Edmunds tested it on the electric Mustang Mach-E fitted with the latest version called BlueCruise 1.3.

BlueCruise is easy to turn on and use. It also worked pretty well during testing for keeping the Mach-E in its lane and keeping the proper distance from vehicles ahead. Edmunds did notice that the automatic lane change feature — the vehicle will steer itself into the next lane if you activate the turn signal — brought about a few concerning incidents in which the Mach-E was traveling a lot quicker than the vehicle in the next lane. Additionally, BlueCruise doesn’t do as good of a job as the other systems of indicating when it deactivates because of road conditions and needs the driver to take over.