Cars that come with adaptive cruise control
Motorway journeys should, in theory, be smooth. Just you, your car, and the long stretch of road ahead.
Unfortunately, you’re rarely alone on a motorway.
While you can control your own driving, you can’t control how other people around you drive, and this often means you’re having to quickly respond to cars braking, changing lanes, or speeding up.
And this can mean leg cramps, especially if you’re on a longer journey.
Luckily, cruise control is here to rescue your legs – and your sanity.
Traditional cruise control has been around in some form for longer than you might think. It was first engineered for steam engines way back in the seventeenth century, and started appearing in cars at the beginning of the twentieth century.
But traditional cruise control systems limit you to telling your car simply the speed you want it to run at – you still have to do all the work of speeding up and slowing down, depending on what the vehicles around you are doing.
And so adaptive cruise control was born.
What is adaptive cruise control?
Adaptive cruise control is a system that allows you to set a max speed, and accelerates and decelerates the car in response to the other vehicles around you to maintain this speed.
It’s not a self-driving system.
It is semi-autonomous, but you still retain the majority of the power and responsibility.
Adaptive cruise control works by allowing you to set a max speed, as well as a gap in either seconds or metres between your car and the car in front. If that car decelerates, your car will also slow down to match and maintain that gap.
If the car in front moves lanes, your car will either accelerate until it hits your max speed, or until it’s your preferred gap from the car in front – i.e., five seconds.
If you brake or accelerate independently of the adaptive cruise control system, it’ll shutdown and you’ll have to set it again.
Be aware that not all adaptive cruise control systems work in the same way, so you’ll need to check your car's manual to see exactly how your cruise control works.
