You’ve never driven a car with manual transmission, have you? It’s pretty much impossible to use your left foot to brake with since the clutch is in the way. It’s funny that I was taught the exact opposite from you, that braking with your left is unsafe because of the possibility of simultaneously stomping on the gas while you’re trying to brake.
If you think that people won’t do something like that, think again. People do all sorts of stupid stuff in emergency situations. Reducing the Murphy’s Law factor, by training people to do things in a way that makes both accelerating and braking at the same time close to impossible, is a good thing.
I used to when I had a car that wanted to stall out at stops, so I needed to keep one foot on the gas at all times, but when the brake was not needed the left foot would stay on the floor to the left of the brake, no chance at riding the brake.
In critical situations I could use both feet, and go from full gas to full brake instantly, much faster then one foot driving. Some time after getting rid of that car, in such a critical situation I found myself going back to 2 foot driving.
I have no doubt that when experienced with 2 foot driving, you have better response time, especially when you know you are getting in a sticky situation and you can instantly go from gas to brake back to gas.
I use cruise control very frequently on the interstate, both in city and rural areas. I keep a very safe following distance, so I am unaffected by minor changes in speed of the car ahead of me. Those who think they need to have a foot over the brake when using CC are likely not using a safe following distance. Anyway, braking usually is not the best maneuver for avoiding an accident at the speeds CC is typically used
… doesn’t CC get disconnected the moment you tap the gas or brake? CC is nice because it lets me wiggle my feet and put them up and down, but I still keep them on the pedals most of the time. “Most” of the time means in about the same ratio as I keep my hands on the wheel.
When I had CC, I used it mostly on highways. Never downtown (I’ve been laughed at because when I’m in heavy city traffic I treat some automatics as if they were manual, forcing them into a lower gear than they try to keep).
You’re at your keyboard. One of your hands in over the letters “HJKL” and one is over the letters “ASDF”.
Is the hand that is over the “ASDF” on the same side of the body of the foot that you work the brake with?
That’s CRAZY.
Anyway, I use cruise control only when I have long stretches of highway, and not much traffic. For this reason, I do not hover my foot over the brake pedal. In other words, there’s no situation in which I’m using cruise control in which I’ll ever have to brake suddenly.
I only use my cruise control if I can expect to travel for at least five miles without having to slow down for anything. This pretty much limits me to using cruise control while travelling on the interstate outside of the city or on a straight highway with little to no traffic.
Well I’m not her, but it in not crazy, I content in critical situations, once one has learned how to use both feet, you have MUCH better reaction time. And makes perfect sense, total control of gas and brake when needed. Now hovering over the brake continously is crazy.
Never use it- I find the constant checking of the speedometer to make sure I’m not speeding too excessively is preferable to the odd feeling of not having my foot on the gas pedal- its not like while driving I need my foot for something else.
Just got back from a 1500 mile road trip. Used it pretty much the whole way. Otherwise, I don’t use it too much. Though my Wife will use it driving to work. She has a bit of a lead foot, and she is trying to avoid a ticket.
One thing I have noticed, and don’t like about cruise control is those people that will take 20 miles to pass you. It’s dangerous to sit in someones blind spot for long periods. Just give it a little gas to get around will ya?
Right on. To partly address Nava above, cruise control doesn’t get disengaged when using the gas pedal to attain a higher speed for passing. After the passing maneuver, let off the gas, and your car will drop back down to the CC set speed.
Alternatively, one could give the SET button (on Ford cruise controls, YMMV) five or six taps, get up to passing speed, and then give the COAST button five or six taps to get back down to the original CC speed.
I found it easy to get used to using SET and COAST much like a gas pedal/brake system. I don’t need wide open road to use the CC this way … so long as the prevailing traffic is going around the speed limit, I can avoid using the pedals for quite a long time in relatively dense, but still rapidly-moving, traffic. When the density gets to where I can start surveying the traffic around me in mental “car lengths apart”, I disengage the CC.
My current car does not have CC, and with a 100 mile per day commute, I wish it did. But my wife’s car has it and I use it in town all the time and on trips, of course. I like the idea of maintaining a constant speed to improve mileage, don’t know how valid that is. One previous car I’ve owned had CC and that really got me used to it. In fact, I probably got a little crazy and used it more than I should have, like all the time. Ah, youth! (OK, it was 6 years ago, but still, I’ve learned since then.)
And regarding the left-foot braking, I had a car with carb problems that I was too cheap to get fixed and on really warm days it didn’t idle for shit. It was a 4-speed, so I’d pop it out of gear, brake with the left foot and blip the gas a bit so it wouldn’t stall. I hated that car from about the day I bought it.
