Lincoln ActiveGlide (Ford BlueCruise) First Drive: Hands-Free Highs And Lows

The good news is that, for the most part, Ford and Lincoln could address a lot of this uncertainty with software updates. ActiveGlide and BlueCruise are part of the automaker’s OTA-capable system, with the potential for upgrades, tweaks, and new features being added remotely. 

We’ve seen GM make use of its similar system, adding new Super Cruise features and massaging behaviors like lane-positioning. That’s something else that ActiveGlide could do with having adjusted, as I realized when a car in the lane beside me swung wide because the beefy Navigator was uncomfortably close to the white lines. Hopefully Ford and Lincoln will also eventually use it to deliver things like automatic lane-changes, which Super Cruise and Autopilot can do, but BlueCruise and ActiveGlide currently cannot.

Beyond that, the automaker isn’t talking about further steps toward expanding the system. Building out the mapping network of divided highways is one thing, but we’ve seen big promises from General Motors about its next-generation Ultra Cruise system. That will apparently be able to not only operate on highways, but eventually 95-percent of all driving scenarios according to the automaker: that includes “nearly every road including city streets, subdivision streets and paved rural roads,” GM promises. The human driver behind the wheel will still need to monitor it, but it would be a huge step forward from Super Cruise today.

I’m of the opinion that true autonomous vehicles are still quite some way out, and I’m not alone in that pessimism. These Level 2 assistance systems aren’t so much precursors to driverless cars, as they are — when treated sensibly — limited ways to alleviate stress in certain situations and settings. Used appropriately, I’ve found they can definitely help there, though the key is communication between vehicle and driver as to who, exactly, is doing what at each moment in time. ActiveCruise certainly has the underpinnings of just such a system, but I feel like Lincoln still has some work to do on making it a more collaborative co-pilot.