There are differing models of self driving, from adaptive cruse control to full, and flavors in-between. Do they, or any of them also allow the use of standard cruse control where it holds the speed only?
You mean the type that lets you run into the car in front of you? No, it would not pass Federal regulatiins if it allowed that.
He probably meant where it doesn’t control the steering.
I’m pretty sure the newer Volvos with lane assist, for example, can have that lane assist turned off. I doubt you could turn off the feature that stops you from ramming the person in front of you. I don’t know about Teslas or GMCs with full auto drive.
Lane Departure Assist/Warning is separate from cruise control and yes it can be turned off on the vehicle I have (2019 Altima) because some people find it annoying (like my GF) because it causes the wheel to slightly vibrate when you get too close to one o the two lines. Myself I keep it on, but my GF often doesn’t use her turn signals so the warning goes off all the time.
On Teslas, yes.
One tap down on the shifter to enable adaptive cruise control, and two taps down to enable self driving. (On the 3 and Y, on the S and X it’s a different lever.)
It’s still adaptive cruise control, that will match the speed of the car in front of you. I think that can be disabled in settings. You’ll still have emergency braking.
Our 2021 Rav4 has adaptive cruise control with braking and steering but it can be switched to standard, “speed only” with a button on the steering wheel. I turn off the adaptive if the lanes are narrow as the car is constantly correcting to the center of the lane.
Our 2020 CRV has adaptive cruise control, which is completely separate from the lane keeping assistance. I can’t completely turn the adaptive cruise off, but I can adjust how close it can get to the car ahead, using a button on the steering column,
The lane keeping assistance is mildly entertaining: a few times, when we’ve been on a deserted road, I’ve played with letting it basically steer the car (hands ALWAYS loosely gripping the steering wheel, ready to clamp down, as I’m not a COMPLETE idiot). It sometimes does a fairly good job, but other times doesn’t kick in soon enough, or overcorrects. So it’s quite a ways away from any kind of real automation.
Weirdly, it does NOT have any kind of automatic braking (aside from the adaptive cruise control, which will actually brake the car if someone cuts in front of us). It will warn me - flashing a notice on the dashboard - if I’m approaching a car too closely / quickly at a stoplight or whatever, but will not do anything more than that. In other words, it’s a completely useless “feature”, since one hopes that the driver is looking at the road / cars, not the dashboard.
As far as self-driving cars: I honestly don’t know about regular cruise control. I assume that if they do, it is only when you’ve got all the automation features turned off.
I have a 2017 CRV and the automatic brake does fully stop the car. Shortly after I got it, I was doing ~30 down a side street when a car pulled out from a driveway a good ways in front of me. The automatic braking gave a warning and I slowed down, but didn’t brake. Suddenly the car completely stopped. I thought I hit something in the road and had to restart the car to continue one. I was a good 10 feet away and the car was accelerating in front of me.
Here’s a video of it in action: https://youtu.be/jvxFFKv80H8?t=192
Newer Teslas (like my 2021 Model 3) no longer let you turn off adaptive cruise control. It’s a design decision.
Unfortunately, the current Tesla implementation of adaptive cruise control is extremely skittish. Parked car close to edge of lane–medium to hard brake. Shadow from oncoming vehicle happens to fall into your lane–slam on the brakes.
It does a great job of adapting to the speed of the vehicle in front of you, and you can adjust the follow distance. Not so good at knowing what’s actually in your lane. Which makes cruise control only useful on multi-lane, limited access highways.
My 2017 Chevy Bolt has regular cruise control and it’s so much easier to drive through the city than my Tesla, which is better on the freeway.
Yeah, phantom braking is still a problem. I think it is somewhat better now than it was previously, even when my car was actually using its radar. I’m on the full self driving beta, so it is probably different on the non-FSD cars. It seems much better at not panic braking for bridge or tree shadows.
On a recent trip it was having some problems with mirages. It also had problems with oncoming cars when the road curved and went down a slight hill. The cars were in my straight-ahead path, but not on my path if I followed the road. It also got twitchy when I was driving directly into the sun. I’ve also seen the problem you mention with parked cars, but that’s also gotten better over the years.
I’m glad the NTSB (or whoever) has opened in inquiry into Tesla about the phantom braking problems. This is something that Tesla needs to be working very hard on to correct.
For those who’ve never experienced it. This isn’t a complete deal breaking problem, just something that needs to be monitored when the car is driving, and something that might make cruise control unusable for brief periods—until the road curves or the sun moves a bit, for example. For all of the problems, I’m still not looking forward to the upcoming summer road trip in the car with dumb cruise control.
So, do you get rear ended once/week, more than once/week, daily?
No, I pay attention to what is going on behind me and cover the brake and throttle as necessary. Phantom braking is also much less likely in dense traffic where tailgating and other rear ending risk factors are increased.
It’s also very, very rarely a full on panic stop. It’s usually just a brief decrease in speed. Definitely a problem if I’m being tailgated by somebody looking down at their phone, but in that case I’m also doing things to either get out of the way, or to massively increase my following distance in the event I need to slow down for a good reason.
Don’t discount the huge upside of traffic aware cruise control. If the person checking their phone behind me were using it, they wouldn’t be tailgating, and if my speed does change their car would also slow, without even having to pause their TikTok video.
I mean, that’s really the key to all of this. 
Is that type of cruise control not allowed anymore?