Watch out, Tom Cruise. General Motors might come after you next.
Ted Cruz, too. Who knows how far GM’s lawyers will go at this point.
For now, GM — despite having failed to get any traction yet with its 2019 racketeering lawsuit against Fiat Chrysler Automobiles — is now burning bridges with its other crosstown rival, Ford Motor Co.
At issue is Ford’s decision to call its upcoming hands-free driving technology “BlueCruise.”
The lawsuit, filed July 23, calls BlueCruise “a brazen attempt” by Ford to take advantage of positive press about GM’s hands-free Super Cruise technology and Cruise, the San Francisco company GM bought in 2016.
BlueCruise, the complaint says, is “far less advanced than Cruise’s technology and thus likely to yield an inferior consumer experience, with the potential for comfort and safety issues.”
Ford called the suit “meritless and frivolous,” saying the name is a reference to its Blue Oval logo and cruise control, not Super Cruise.
To me, it sounds more like the defunct kids show “Blue’s Clues,” anyway.
As for “Supercruise,” it’s a long-established aviation term that means sustained supersonic flight. Anyone who’s flown on the Concorde might get into a GM vehicle with Super Cruise and find its inability to leave the ground or break the sound barrier to be an inferior consumer experience.
GM goes even further, claiming to now be the only company that can use the word “cruise” for anything related to automated driving.
That’s quite an assertion. GM even admits in the suit that “cruise control, which enables cars to maintain a speed set by the driver, or speed within a narrow range, has been available for decades.”
Ironically, one of the few vehicles built over the past decade that didn’t come with cruise control standard was the Chevrolet Cruze. GM apparently felt it wasn’t at all confusing to sell the Cruze without cruise, Cruise or Super Cruise. (This is the same company that had Chevy dealerships sell Bolts and Volts alongside each other, but that’s a different topic.)
Though GM’s suit makes Cruise and Super Cruise sound related, the similarity is coincidental. The automaker started using the phrase “Super Cruise” in 2012, four years before buying Cruise. A Cadillac news release introduced the technology as an evolution of adaptive cruise control.
By the time GM adopted the Super Cruise name, the Capital Jazz Fest in suburban Washington had already run six iterations of a yearly Caribbean vacation it calls SuperCruise. The 14th annual SuperCruise, scheduled to set sail from Florida in January, includes stops in Aruba, Bonaire and Curacao for what its website says will be “8 days and nights of jazz, soul, comedy, gospel, and funk!”
Maybe the GM legal team can take some time off to join the fun (and funk). It sounds like they need a chance to relax.