'Adapting' to fancy cruise control

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DRIVER'S SIDE DIATRIBE
By Al Vinikour         
 
I have never been afraid to admit when I’m wrong. Practically speaking it’s such a rare occurrence that I sometimes find it refreshing. This time I’m referring to a technical package I’ve often been negative on – adaptive cruise control.
 
To offer a simple explanation, while regular cruise control will keep on going until you ram into the car in front of you, adaptive cruise control sends out a radar beam that “sees” the vehicle you’re moving up on and automatically slows you down to match the speed of the vehicle ahead of you.
 
Cruise control has always been one of my favorite devices. I can’t estimate how many tickets I’ve been spared in my lifetime because I was cruising along (pardon the pun) with the cruise control set 3-4 miles above the speed limit; chuckling at the poor guys alongside the highway waiting for the officer to emerge from his patrol car and issue them a ticket to “the policemen’s ball.” 
 
However, I have not always been a fan of adaptive cruise control. The first time I used it on a long trip it was raining cats and dogs (animal lovers please don’t write) and I couldn’t get it to operate correctly because the heavy raindrops were blocking out the radar and the system thought it was a vehicle close in front instead of just rain. I wound up “hand flying” my car for about 600 miles. How archaic! But a recent trip has now made a true believer out of me.
 
I went from Detroit to Chicago (and back) this past week and I was driving it in a fine, fine Lexus vehicle that had adaptive cruise control. As per usual I set it at 73 mph (for a 70 mph speed limit on I-94), turned the radio (I’m sorry…harman/kardon audio system) to Blue Collar Comedy Channel and headed west. There’s lots of truck traffic on that interstate so until the traffic cleared out somewhere west of Ann Arbor it was basically stop-and-go. However, once in the clear it was great.
 
There are three distance settings for the adaptive cruise control on the vehicle I was driving and I put it on the least-powerful number. I didn’t even have to worry about playing the “can I avoid putting my foot on the brake because a vehicle is passing me in the left lane and I’ll have to reset the resume button if I have to brake?” game because it automatically slowed me down. When the passing vehicle was far enough ahead of me I pulled into the fast lane and once I was within a safe distance of the leading car my vehicle sped up to the set speed on its own, without me having to do a darn thing except laugh at Larry the Cable Guy’s jokes.  
 
Adaptive cruise control will not allow you to climb up the back of the vehicle in front of you like Sir Edmund Hillary did Mt. Everest. The only aggravating aspect of this system is the lag in its return to cruising speed once the space in front of you has cleared.
 
It takes a few extra seconds and during that time, cars are quickly moving up on you, and until you resume the speed you’ve set for, there’s no doubt the people behind you are calling you toilet words. In that case you accelerate with the gas pedal and avoid the lag. I became fairly coordinated within about 50 miles or so.
 
Think of this column as my written apology to all those adaptive cruise control systems I’ve trashed during the years. I am now a believer in this technology and consider it my friend. Once you master it’s idiosyncrasies you can create your own reality show and name it something like “Adaptively Cruising with the Stars.”