Ford goes after GM's Cruise and Super Cruise trademarks in response to lawsuit
The Blue Oval argues that the trademark office shouldn't have issued trademarks for those terms in the first place.
There seem to be few things that big companies like more than getting into conflicts with other big companies over intellectual property, and the recent GM lawsuit against Ford for using the name BlueCruise for its new hands-free driving assistant is an excellent example of that. Now, Ford is deciding to hit back at GM with its own slice of legal action, according to a report last week by Automotive News.
Specifically, Ford is petitioning the US Patent and Trademark Office to revoke GM's trademarks for the phrases "Cruise" and "Super Cruise," which it argues should never have been registered in the first place. GM thinks that Ford's tech is inferior to its own and that customers might conflate the two systems and think Super Cruise is bad if they don't like BlueCruise.
GM's Super Cruise debuted in 2016 with the Cadillac CT6 sedan and has been in steady development ever since. It's currently arguably the leader when it comes to hands-free driving technology, thanks in large part to its driver monitoring system.
Ford plans to launch BlueCruise (or whatever it ends up being called if it loses this suit) later in 2021 on both the F-150 pickup and the Mustang Mach-E EV.
We asked Ford for comment but didn't hear back in time for publication.
