Looking to move one step ahead in the in-car telematics game, GM’s luxury division has taken the wraps off of the new Cadillac CUE infotainment system, which will debut next year in the upcoming Cadillac XTS and ATS sedans as well as the SRX crossover. In making the announcement at the CTIA Wireless Association’s Enterprise and Applications conference in San Diego, Don Butler, Vice President, Cadillac Marketing, positioned it as a genuine breakthrough, stating: “CUE will transform personal transportation by simply and efficiently integrating luxury design and instinctive technology with unparalleled levels of customized in-vehicle connectivity.”
CUE – which stands for Cadillac User Experience – is designed to be a simple, flexible but extremely powerful architecture that can fully integrate information from up to 10 Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices, USBs, SD cards and MP3 players. It will offer a number of industry firsts, including proximity sensing and multi-touch hand gesture recognition capability on its 8.0-inch LCD central display touch screen, buttons that provide haptic tactile feedback, natural-speech recognition with text-to-speech capability and a 12.3-inch fully reconfigurable main gauge cluster on some models. Running on Linux operating system coupled with a high-speed ARM 11 three-core processor, CUE features an open architecture with 3.5 times the processing power of any current infotainment system and is completely updateable.
Cadillac began work on the new CUE system in 2008, when a group of designers spent six months with 32 consumers to study their actual driving habits. Using data from that experience, the engineering staff created a system that would facilitate quick, easy and undistracted access to a broad range of functions – including the full array of enhanced OnStar features as well as those of the entertainment, navigation and communication systems. In addition to opting for highly-legible and user-customizable smartphone-style icon array on the CUE’s main screen, simplification efforts led them to reduce the primary button count from the normal 20 to just four and incorporate a pair of five-way controllers on the steering wheel that allow hands-on activation of numerous other functions. As a final touch, the elegantly integrated CUE system features a motorized swing-away faceplate beneath the fixed center display that gives access to a 1.8-liter concealed storage area. Other features in the new Cadillac CUE setup incline a premium audio system with AM/FM/HD/XM satellite radio, 3D navigation maps, real-time Doppler radar weather, two USB ports, an SD slot, Bluetooth 3.0, iPod integration and a rear backup camera as well as an optional BluRay DVD rear-seat entertainment system.
