Personally I hate cruise control. I prefer to be actively engaged when driving. Either I am driving 100% or I am not at all, there is absolutely no middle ground in my opinion
I can understand that. I like cruise control because it lets me focus 100% on steering and watching the road around me.
Trying to maintain a steady speed and conserve gas is a fun challenge, but a bit pointless, because a) it's a distraction from more important tasks, and b) the computer can usually do it better than I can.
You're a better friend than I am. That truly is torture, and is the reason I volunteer to drive on ALL trips. I don't care how long. People who can't maintain proper speed without either flooring it, or taking their foot off the pedal, shouldn't be driving.
>People who can't maintain proper speed without either flooring it, or taking their foot off the pedal, shouldn't be driving.
Not entirely true. I've been to German driving school and my father really pushed the concept of smooth throttle control on me as a beginning driver. Be smooth always. However, as I was able to afford higher and higher performance vehicles my take on the smooth maintaining of speed without noticeable accelerator input has changed. While I'll drive my SUV very smoothly, when I drive my manual six speed German roadster, my style is entirely different. Because of the weight, size, and HP, it's really not possible to drive it smoothly outside of tossing it into 6th which isn't terribly "fun". In the gears where it's "fun", it's a very much "on" or "off" throttle experience simply because of the HP produced by the engine.
I drive a manual transmission BMW. The shifting, and speed control can be as smooth as glass. It's the driver not the machine. Take consideration for your passenger, and everyone else on the road.
Yes, but its not a 577 HP track-tuned roadster. I can drive my 320 HP manual sedan quite smoothly as well. There are some cars where:
a) you don't want to drive them smoothing because that's no fun - even for just the exhaust note &
b) It's actually difficult to drive them smoothly because of the torque/HP.
It doesn't mean you are a bad driver, it simply means you've adjusted your driving style to match the car you are driving.
I DOUBT OP was taking a six hour road trip with his friend in a 577 HP track car. Which is the point here. It's awesome that you have a race car, but comparing that to the rest of our daily drivers makes no sense.
Cruise control on my car actually gains me about 1 mpg. This is specifically because the car "knows" that the speed won't be changing much so it locks the torque converter completely and drops the engine RPM by 100~200. Many of those things are direct results of the mediocre Ford implementation of the 2005 Five Hundred CVT and the fact that it predates Adaptive Cruise Control, but it has a physical reason and follows directly from new assumptions in the code only viable from the state I put it in.
We've actually moved quite a bit away from "100%" direct control.
Anti-lock brakes were the first such system. Before, you had to pump the brakes in an emergency, a practice that was difficult to execute even without the shock of an impeding accident. That system alone certainly saves thousands of lives every year.
Ahem. That is purely semantics -- ABS makes the car perform more like what you are conditioned to expect (under normal driving conditions). That's the whole success of ABS; it saves lives precisely because it conveys the illusion of you still being 100% under direct control when in fact you would be careening out of control otherwise.
One of the things I've heard mentioned by professional driving instructors, without a good citation, is that many more accidents could be avoided if people trusted ABS more. Specifically, when you're braking hard/panic braking and the ABS kicks it, the shock of the rapid firing against your foot causes you to back off pressure on the brake pedal. I was specifically instructed to stand on it anyway to see what the car behaved like when truly panic stopping and maintaining pressure, but I definitely had an instinctive reaction to let off of the brake when the ABS kicked in. If you're ever in that situation, press harder, don't let up!
Unless you live in the US in the Midwest or New England area, then the likelihood of you never having experienced ABS kicking in is likely to be 0%. Braking on ice is not the most fun experience.
I have ABS kick on around once-twice a season. I mean, sure, if you live somewhere it doesn't snow you won't even experience ABS, but if you live in a climate where it snows you definitely will.
That being said, it's always been while stopping for a light, not in a case when I had to swerve, so its never prevented a crash for me, but it really is comforting to have it.
Around Houston I was surprised to see many warning about ice on the roads. Aparently even in Texas on a cold night a road especially on bridges can freeze resulting in black ice.
It's important to practice once in a while. Find a clear road where you're not putting anyone else at risk and get used to the feeling, so you'll not release the brakes in an emergency.
Cruise control is great where there's long stretches of open road, light traffic (LOS A or B [1]), and little need for frequent braking.
The star usecase is to set cruise to be very near the speed limit, such that after acceleration events like overtaking, you coast back to highway speed.
It's a low-effort way of ensuring that one will be compliant with speed laws most of the time, yet maintaining a steady pace. I too prefer to be 'actively engaged' while driving, but in my opinion the reduction of constant acceleration input is a welcome convenience.
'Adaptive' cruise control, on the other hand, feels to me like riding on a tenuous rollercoaster. It's intended to let cruise control be usable in packed traffic, but it requires one to cede a lot of trust and control to the machine in ways that physically make me uneasy -- and it doesn't help that the exact behavior differs between models and manufacturers, so that trust doesn't automatically transplant into a different car.
Part of the problem is, again, with terminology. Ever since Adaptive Cruise Control proliferated as a term, it drew a parallel to classic 'Cruise Control', which I think is a mistake. Classic Cruise Control is a fire-and-forget, non-safety feature that's simple to reason about: do I want the car to gun it at a constant 70 mph, or no? You can run a quick mental judgement call and decide whether to engage it or leave it off.
'Adaptive' cruise control fundamentally about maintaining following distance, i.e. tailgating restriction. It's a safety feature. It's a button to "proceed forward not exceeding target speed", but if it gets disengaged for any reason then you can easily overrun into the car ahead. It's a safety feature with the UI/UX of a non-safety feature, so it's always opt-in (!) -- which is simply horrific.
All safety features in vehicles should be either always-on, or opt-out, and NEVER opt-in. On a modern car, tailgate restriction should be on by default, with a button unlocking the car into free-throttle mode. Braking -- alone -- should never disable a safety feature.
ACC/ICC is not a safety feature in the general sense. It might be termed as a safety enhancement to cruise control, in which case it should be opt-out when entering cruise control (which it is, in my case) and which disengages when exiting cruise control (which is done by braking, and that is well known).
On ceding trust - at least with the ICC system in Nissans, it's A) far back, which gives more reaction time B) quite easy to tell when it sees the car in front vs when it doesn't. You're ceding trust, sure, but you can also verify easily.
Your 'tailgate restriction' bit is effectively a more agressive form of collision warning/forward emergency braking, and FCW+FEB as far as I know is available on all or at least most vehicles with ACC/ICC. Unfortunately, the realities of city driving means that 'maintaining distance' is a goal in some cases (i.e. just got cut off, tight merges, etc) rather than an absolute directive - frankly, something trying to force me to a certain distance away from the car in front of me would be more aggravating than useful.
