This week we’re taking a look at Ford Blue Cruise. I’ve taken several long-distance road trips with it, including using it on a trip from Jacksonville, FL to Houston, TX and back, and from Jacksonville to Delaware and back.
You’ll find all the relevant info about Blue Cruise in the video, but in terms of a quick summary, it works as expected. It is truly a hands-free system that allows the driver to take a break from steering, braking and accelerating for many miles at a time – as long as you are on that Ford calls Hand-Free Blue Zones, which make up more than 130,000 miles of North American roads.
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For the most part, think interstates. Blue Cruise isn’t going to work on most secondary roads, although Ford does have plans to add thousands of miles of additional roads with regular over-the-air mapping updates.
On roads that are not mapped by Ford, adaptive cruise control and lane keeping (automated steering) will continue to work but you’ll be prompted to keep your hand on the wheel about every 25 seconds or so.
Most questions you probably have about how Blue Cruise operates in the real word are answered in the above EV Rider video. Additional questions you may have about setting it up or using it are answered in this Ford Blue Cruise tutorial:
Ford started rolling out Blue Cruise to the all-electric Ford Mach-E and F-150 series in 2021, with plans to bring it do additional Ford models.
Ford says it did 500,000 miles of development testing before publicly launching Blue Cruise. “There are highway intricacies and driving conditions that you simply cannot replicate in a lab,” said Hau Thai-Tang, Ford chief product platform and operations officer in a news release. “Sending these vehicles out for real-world driving experience is just on” of many ways we ensured that BlueCruise technology offers confidence and convenience for drivers all across the continent.”
Ford is targeting to sell more than 100,000 vehicles equipped with BlueCruise in its first full year of production, based on company sales and take-rate projections.
Ford’s Blue Cruise is defined by the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) as a Level 2 semi-autonomous driving system. In addition to this chart, a more detailed explanation about the levels of driving autonomy is available here.
