Occasionally you see people giving their dog a stern talking to for tugging at the leash, barking at a goose or engaging in other dog-typical behaviour.
Part of me wants to say “the dog doesn’t understand!”, but I don’t, because that would be weird. Also I do understand the urge to chastise something for only doing what its innate but relatively simple evolutionary programming tells it to do – particularly given that many modern cars come with adaptive cruise control.
I often find myself shouting at a test car: “Just go 70mph, you bastard!” Who decided that adaptive cruise control is a superior version of normal cruise control, rendering the latter obsolete? Some cars still let you switch between the two, but adaptive is the default and only option with most these days.
Adaptive cruise control can be quite useful in dense traffic, when you’ve got no choice but to just stay in your lane and go with the flow. At almost any other time on the motorway, though, I find ‘dumb’ cruise control far more relaxing: Just set it to 70mph, and when the distance to the car in front becomes uncomfortable, indicate right and overtake.
If you want to do that and maintain good lane discipline with adaptive cruise control, you need to guess when the car ahead is going to start to slow and either override it with the accelerator or move to the right lane sooner than would be ideal.
That’s not to mention the stress caused by the sensors seeing ghosts and applying the brakes for no reason or deciding to slow down because there’s a slight curve in the road.
Unless you’re happy to be a cruise control zombie mindlessly sitting in the middle lane at 65mph with another car glued to your rear bumper, adaptive cruise control actually requires more brainpower, effort and general babysitting from the driver. I’ve spoken to several colleagues who feel the same way about cruise control – but maybe we’re in a control-freak motoring journalist bubble.
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Cruise control is a necessary evil, where cameras and such punish you for using your judgement about speed. So you instead just drive at whatever limit is posted. You learn to judge when the adaptive one us catching up and to overtake. Mine has a neat trick of giving you a warning in the HUD a couple of seconds before the brakes are applied as you get nearer.
I'd love to buy a new car, but they've become horrible. I don't need or want all these gadgets.
A test drive is now tricky. In the old days (10 years ago) you'd just see how it drove. Now you ought to spend half a day playing with it, to see how the ADAS systems behave, how well the touch screen works, whether it has proper controls for wipers, windows etc. Stuff you used to take for granted, but can't any more. Apparently some cars no longer have 4 switches for the windows, but 2 switches and a front/rear switch. Who decided that added complication was a good idea?
I'm fed up. I'd love to spend money on a new car, but they are mostly ugly inside and out, and infested with unwanted electronics of dubious reliability.
The priority on the test drive isn't the drive itself, it's the ADAS disabling routine and how long it takes. If that test is passed then we can move onto other things.