Serena Williams lets go of the wheel in her lincoln
Lincoln BlueCruise demos a Path Toward Driver Relaxation
Serena Williams sails by the sea on a costal road in a Lincoln Navigator in "Letting Go,” a new short creative spot. The image is dreamy and contemplative to underscore Lincoln’s serene vibe. Her drive is interspersed with images of a young girl preparing to float on her back for the first time. In the next scene, after a dramatic count down, Williams lifts her hands from the steering wheel demonstrating the effortless feeling of using BlueCruise, Lincoln’s hands-free driving software that uses camera and radar to operate the vehicle on designated sections of highway.
As Williams lifts her hands, the camera cuts to the girl releasing her father’s hand as she bobs on top of the water. Her vehicle is shown from above, driving along a bridge using BlueCruise against a soft, tangerine sky. The final scene depicts Williams standing on the beach, pregnant, and looking peacefully at the sea.
I spoke to Williams in late August. I asked her what it feels like to let go. “Letting go can be scary, it’s a skill that has taken me a long time to master - whether I’m letting go of one phase of my career or letting go of a responsibility at the office. Once you finally do let go, it’s the best feeling. It’s like riding a rollercoaster and floating in a still body of water all at once.”
Williams, a former professional tennis player who is among the world’s most accomplished athletes, a successful serial entrepreneur, and now mother of two, is firmly in control. If she can let go, shouldn’t we all? The message is clear: BlueCruise software takes stress off the driver. It’s a new way of framing the technology that underpins the future of driving, and Lincoln’s desire to make its customers embrace relaxation both in and out of the car. Lincoln invited me to a yoga class to observe National Relaxation Day, an activation that reinforced its chill brand persona. While I’ve tested various self-driving technology in recent years, its the first time I thought of driver assistance software as a way to unwind, a clever approach to make new tech more accessible and less intimidating.
“It's one of those features that once you use it, its kind of like thinking back to when you experienced your first drive with heated seats or a heated steering wheel and you thought, oh my gosh, there's I'm never going to be able to drive another vehicle again without those two features,” Summer Cole, Lincoln Brand Marketing Manager, told me in an interview. “BlueCruise is that feature that does take away a lot of the stress that we have as drivers. The sense that you get that you can really take your hands off the wheel, your foot off the pedal, and let some of those tensions and stress go for the duration of your drive. You can't really believe it until you experience it.”
““Letting go can be scary, it’s a skill that has taken me a long time to master.””
To support the system’s safe use, a driver-facing camera located in the instrument cluster tracks the driver’s gaze and head position. Other carmakers have software that shares similarities to BlueCruise offering varying degrees of driver autonomy, each branded with unique names — Mercedes-Benz makes Drive Pilot and General Motors has Super Cruise. These driver assistance programs tend to take a similar safety first approach toward self-driving features, moving more slowly toward the eventual direction of full autonomy. It’s software that can be constantly updated over the air. “We cannot take our eyes off the road for so long,” Cole says. “We can't like, swivel armchairs around and have conversations and meetings in our cars, so we're not autonomous yet, but it is hands free.” As BlueCruise moves into more vehicles in the Lincoln lineup, its all about lightening the driver’s load. Or as Williams framed it to me, “With the busy schedule I do have, often times driving home after dropping Olympia off at school is the only alone time I get, so I try to make my drives as peaceful as possible.”