Cruise control is a godsend if you make long drives on freeways. LA - Las Vegas is a real slog without it.
Yes, I hate adaptive cruise control for this reason. I’m on a freeway in the slow lane and approach a car when it’s typically appropriate to pull into the next lane to pass them my speed is now to low to merge into traffic. I’ve turned it off in every car I’ve owned that had it. Any time traffic is heavy enough you need the car to slow you down regularly you should be driving not the car.
The best cruise control I’ve had was on my 2014 BMW 535d. I dove up and down Wolf Creek Pass with my cruise control and my speed never varied 1 mph from its set point it was a miracle.
In England I find that the motorways are constantly so busy with vehicles going at all sorts of speeds (or at least they were until recently) that I rarely get a chance to use cruise control.
Cruise control on BMW or Tesla works just fine, keeps to the speed set whatever the terrain. I recall reading a complaint from someone in New Zealand who got a ticket in a Toyota because the cruise control downshifted for a hill and ended up exceeding the setting and getting him a ticket. Apparently the anal (i.e. money-hungry) NZ government photo-radar tickets vehicles at 5km/h (3mph) over the speed limit, because a 10kph-over threshold just didn’t bring in enough revenue.
Also, recall the story about California cops stopping someone who fell asleep on autopilot in their Tesla - they got in front of the car and slowed down to a stop. I assume the guy had some gizmo to fake hands on the wheel (old joke is - stuff an orange in the wheel to simulate it being lightly tugged). Mine nags me every 30 seconds or so to tug on the wheel. I gather with the new version of autopilot, if you try to stop a car by slowing in front of it, it will simply change lanes and go around.
As a person that takes 1-2 thousand road trips. It’s quite nice.
I hear that the region around Barstow can be full of bats, especially problematic in a red convertible.
If you don’t speed, you don’t need adaptive speed control, because you’re just about never gaining on the person in front of you.
I’m gonna disagree. The adaptive cruise in my wife’s Acura is brilliant in SoCal traffic. In the course of a few miles you can go from 70mph to stop and go and back again and the car does everything (including slowing to a complete stop, then starting up again) with complete aplomb. I would never forego the option on a new car now, unless the implementation is borked, like it was on some anonymous small rental car I got a couple of months ago. That car could not slow to a stop. It just shut the system off completely at the 40mph threshold. That was less safe than nothing at all, IMO.
Around here, it’s not uncommon for drivers to be going 45 to 50 mph is a 55 zone. I blame texting.
Did you use it on the autobahn? Because I can’t consider it useful on such busy roads. With all the usual madness going on, slow cars and trucks on the right lane, trucks suddenly changing lanes in front of you to overtake each other (mostly just at the beginning of a slope), asshole drivers you suddenly see zapping by in your mirror with 250 km/h, sudden jams lurking behind every curve, I wouldn’t give up control over the throttle for the life of me. For extended dead straight highways in parts of the US I see the usefulness, but not here.
Our vehicles have had it for a while now. To be honest it’s rarely used, even on long road trips around here the roads are either too busy or too variable (curves, etc.).
So I mostly don’t use it and prefer to just maintain speed myself. That said, on our recent trip to New Mexico the highways we were on were so straight and so devoid of other cars that I actually appreciated it quite a bit.
Every car I’ve bought since 1989 has had it. I suspect that it’s a standard feature of all but low-priced cars here in the U.S. at this point, and probably at least an available option on those.
As others have noted, living in a big urban area with lots of traffic, I rarely use my cruise control locally, as either I’m on surface roads (with lots of stoplights), or on highways with a lot of traffic.
I do get a chance to use it when I’m driving home late at night (when traffic is lighter), or when I drive up to Wisconsin to visit family – once I get north of Milwaukee, the traffic becomes very light, and I’m on cruise control for the rest of the drive.
It was, but it was a night drive with not much traffic. And the car also had the adaptive feature mentioned by others. It’s true, I had to intervene periodically for reasons such as those you listed; but afterwards, you can easily switch cruise control on again and take your foot off the pedal for another run until your next intervention. It does add some convenience, and I think that ultimately it also improves safety simply by helping reduce driver fatigue. In addition, there is a tendency for human drivers, even when they intend to maintain a constant speed, to gradually go faster after a while without noticing it, so cruise control can also counteract that.
It automatically honks at hot chicks/ guys/ etc…
I’m convinced that I have a mysterious cruise control power that not infrequently manifests itself on Interstates.
I’m tooling along in a non-passing lane at or slightly above the speed limit, when a car starts following me, not actually tailgating but too close for comfort. There’s plenty of room to pass, but the vehicle stays rooted in its spot. I gradually start to slow down to encourage Bozo to pass, but he slows down too. Eventually when I get down to 55 mph or so, a light bulb comes on and he swings out to pass, zooming ahead so that when I get back to normal speed he continues to fade in the distance.
I call this “adaptive stupidity”.
I had to check to see what year this thread was started.
Bat pucky. There are these things called trucks. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of them, but they drive much slower than the posted speed limit for automobiles.
Then there was the naive guy in a new RV who set cruise control ON and then went back to fix a pot of coffee. Oy.
That makes sense. Do they not off cruise control on manual-shift cars these days? I had Prelude in the late 80s that was standard shift and it came with it. It seemed weird and I used it maybe once.