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I had the occasion to drive a hands-free car, or rather a car with the possibility of hands-free driving under the correct conditions. A Ford product, specifically.

I got to drive one last year, and quite enjoyed Blue Cruise. This year, they made one noticeable upgrade to the Blue Cruise (BC) system and it is both better and worse. I have no idea how they refer to the versions, so I’m just going to call them the 2025 and 2026 versions.

The only thing I noticed was that the 2025 BC would change lanes for you but only if you initiated it by using the turn signal. Tap it so it blinks in the direction you want to go and it will check to make sure the lane is clear, change lanes for you, and then maintain that new lane. The 2026 version handles lane changes in the same way, but it will also decide on its own to change lanes if it wants to.

It is better because it drives more like it should – passing slower traffic on its own rather than needing your input. It is worse because it doesn’t always choose a good time to pass (like maybe let that guy coming up faster go by first), or necessarily do it well (like why are we still slowing down after we’ve moved into the fast lane? Once we move over let’s start accelerating). Maybe it will get better next year, but for now my suggestion to Ford is to have an option for BC so that people can turn off allowing BC to initiate lane changes on its own. It was way too trigger happy with the lane changes.

I much preferred the 2025 setup. I didn’t use the 2026 setup as much as I would have liked to, because I couldn’t trust it to not change lanes at the wrong time. I did end up using it more in low traffic situations, but turned it off when the traffic around us increased. It would have been nice to have an in-between setting because the 2025 setup would have been just fine.

I did notice some other things too. I happened to be using it when I saw a sign that said our lane would be ending, and I thought that would be a good test. So I did nothing and got to find out that BC doesn’t know what to do when the lane it’s in gradually ends. There was no traffic next to us, so it could have moved over. But what it did was just give up and told me to take over driving when it ran out of lane.

Another thing is that it doesn’t look for potholes. So it will stay in its lane just fine and your tires and suspension may pay a price. On the plus side, you can give it a quick steer to avoid an obstacle and it’ll cooperate with you. Besides, you are supposed to paying attention to the road anyway.

And the last thing is that there doesn’t seem to be any coordination between the nav system and BC. This was most obvious when we had to merge from one freeway to another. I was already in the right-hand lane. With the 2025 system it would have been all good. But the 2026 system noticed that we were going slower than my set speed, and the left lane was open, so it decided just before the exit to change lanes out of the exit lane. At the same time the nav system was telling me to be in the right-hand lane. Maybe the system isn’t ready to integrate turn-by-turn stuff with BC, but let’s start with small things like not making the driver’s job worse. If the nav system says to keep right, then just don’t initiate a lane change to the left.