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This is the first known fatality resulting from a crash involving the use of BlueCruise. The NTSB announcement came a day after the safety board announced it’s probing a second fatal crash near Philadelphia where Ford’s driver-assistance system may have been active. You can change the set speed, still with your foot on the brake, by pressing the “+”/Resume or “-”/Set button repeatedly until the system shows your desired speed. Cruise control has come a long way since first invented and patented by Ralph Teetor in 1950, who originally named it the “Speedostat”.
Driver Assistance Technologies - NHTSA
Driver Assistance Technologies.
Posted: Tue, 02 Jan 2024 14:43:34 GMT [source]
Adaptive Cruise Control
The Jaguar/Land Rover Adaptive Cruise w/Steer Assist (tested on a Land Rover Range Rover Sport) performed the worst of any system at keeping the vehicle centered, or even within the lane, on city streets. There were many times the system would suddenly go into a “standby” mode and stop giving steering assistance, and then depart the lane. Other times the steering-assistance remained engaged but the driver still had to intervene to keep the vehicle from crossing over a lane line.
Find New Cars
Yoshi Mobility, a Nashville-based startup that developed an app to offer drivers preventative maintenance, virtual vehicle inspections and electric vehicle charging, raised $26 million in a Series C round led by General Motors Ventures. Bridgestone Americas, Universal Motors Agencies and Shikra Limited also participated. Driving while fatigued is never a good idea, but even less so while using cruise control.
How Intelligent Is Automatic Cruise Control?
The constant rate of speed can also drastically improve fuel efficiency for longer drivers. Cruise control has had a positive impact on the driving industry for 70 years and shows no signs of disappearing anytime soon. After turning on cruise control, you’ll need to set your desired speed. Many systems set the cruise control at the current speed, while others require you to manually set one. You can increase and decrease this speed as needed without interrupting the mechanism.
Two companies are developing a more advanced cruise control that can automatically adjust a car's speed to maintain a safe following distance. This new technology, called adaptive cruise control, uses forward-looking radar, installed behind the grill of a vehicle, to detect the speed and distance of the vehicle ahead of it. “Systems like BlueCruise are an important advancement that can help make driving easier and less stressful,” says Jake Fisher, CR’s senior director of auto testing.
New Automotive Night Vision ADAS Technology Illuminates Driving at Night
A study of 40 drivers by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that they were more likely to speed when equipped with ACC. Mercedes was the first automaker to bring ACC to the U.S. market in 1999. Twenty years later, automakers are still working to improve their cruise control offerings. In the meantime, ACC technology has become one of the building blocks of autonomous driving.
This makes driving not only a lot safer but also more convenient and efficient. When carmakers pitched cruise control to the American public more than half a century ago, they framed it as a way to maintain a safe, consistent speed on the highway and a path to conserving fuel. Although the fuel savings were minimal, both claims were accurate.
Car with automatic cruise control can practically drive themselves. What are the pros and cons of this technology?
However, they will not apply the brakes in the event of overspeeding downhill, nor stop the car from going faster than the selected speed even with the engine just idling. A speed limiter will limit how fast the driver can accelerate behind the wheel. All modern vehicles contain a standard speed limiter capping speed between 120 mph and 180 mph depending to protect the vehicle’s engine and discourage reckless driving. However, an additional limiter can be added as an option in many European-made cars, as well as Tesla, Ford, and Nissan. Drivers are still required to keep their foot on the pedal to keep their vehicle in motion, but will not be able to accelerate past a predefined speed limit. Cruise control is an electronic device within your vehicle that controls the speed of your vehicle.
ACC Calibration Warnings for Drivers
Can you count on them to slow down before you end up in a collision? The good news is that government studies have shown automatic cruise control reduces your chances of crashing into the car in front of you. Not only that, but it has also been proven to maximize fuel efficiency.
That is to say, ACC provides automatic braking and acceleration in a self-driving system that also includes steering, and sometimes automatic lane changing. ACC technology is regarded as a key component of future generations of intelligent cars. The technology enhances passenger safety and convenience as well as increasing road capacity by maintaining optimal separation between vehicles and reducing driver errors.
The driver must manually bring the vehicle up to speed and use a button to set the cruise control to the current speed. That means the following distance will vary based on how fast you’re driving. The more you speed up, the farther back you’ll follow since it would take a greater distance to slow down or come to a stop. Select a following gap between your vehicle and the vehicle ahead using the Gap Setting button on the steering wheel. The current gap setting will display briefly on the DIC and Head-Up Display if equipped. As you can see, cruise control is a great way to relieve much of the stress that comes with everyday driving.
GM’s Super Cruise would have scored the lowest for “displays” if it weren’t for the bright green LED indicator on the top of the steering wheel rim, which makes it clear when the system is engaged. Beyond that, Super Cruise offers little information in the instrument panel beyond a small, steering wheel icon that indicates the system is active. It doesn’t, for example, show a display of the car, lane lines, or the car ahead, as other systems do. BMW and Mercedes ranked at the top when it comes to allowing the driver to give their own steering inputs (known as “collaborative driving”), for example, if you need to swerve out of the lane to avoid a pothole or give some berth to a cyclist. This tells the driver that either the system is steering or the driver, but you can’t have it both ways. We only included vehicles in our testing that were equipped with a system that allows for the simultaneous use of ACC and LCA at highway speeds.
Yes, you will find aftermarket adaptive cruise control kits available. Depending on the features, they range in cost from $250 to nearly $4,000. For most involved electric-system installations, it’s best to get them done by a dealership or certified mechanic. Installation cost depends on the sophistication of the system and the vehicle model. In essence, not only did the 1999 S-Class introduce the driver-aid technology adaptive cruise control (ACC), but it also set the cornerstone of the foundation for self-driving vehicles. Cruise control is less flexible on vehicles with a manual transmission because depressing the clutch pedal and shifting gears usually disengages the cruise control.
Most (but not all) current forms of this ADAS use radar as their main source of information. A radar sensor mounted in the front of the vehicle is used to analyze the road ahead. It does this by emitting radio waves and measuring how long they take to return to the ACC sensor.
We also like that even when driving on pre-mapped divided highways that are theoretically “hands-free zones,” BlueCruise requires drivers to place their hands back on the wheel in advance of risky upcoming scenarios, such as sharp curves or lane merges. While ADA systems are generally not designed for narrow, curvy roads, most systems do allow drivers to use them in those environments. We think it’s smart that GM’s Super Cruise, Lucid’s Highway Assist, and Rivian’s Highway Assist use GPS-based geofencing to ensure operation within relatively safe driving environments, such as divided highways. Both the Hyundai/Kia/Genesis systems and Honda Sensing/Acura Watch have separate controls on the steering wheel enabling the driver to activate ACC and LCA independently, which allows drivers to experience and understand each feature on its own. This makes it possible, for example, for the driver to use LCA without ACC if they want. And it prevents the potential confusion of, say, the LCA automatically engaging when the driver activates ACC.
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