This is Technology Bites, episode 3 for March 26, 2023.
Technology Bites is a microcast where I share my brief insights on an interesting technology.
My name is Joel.
Enjoy, and here we go.
This week I want to talk about adaptive cruise control.
Yes, talking about technology and cars.
I’m not necessarily a car guy, but I’m a technology guy, and this technology is, in my opinion, very, very cool, borders on being absolutely necessary in today’s world.
I drive a Honda Civic, and that is the perspective that I’m going to come from, because that is where I have my experience.
I will talk a little bit about the concept, about what I think about safety, my personal experience, and then a little additional thoughts on top of that.
The concept of adaptive cruise control is to set your speed like any other cruise control would, but then as your car approaches traffic in front of you that is not going the same speed as you, going slower, then your car would automatically slow down.
The way Honda implements that is through camera systems that just look out in front and decide what cars are in front of you and what speeds they’re going, and then reacts accordingly.
It’s not perfect.
There are times where the system breaks where you might not have.
There are times where you think just letting off the gas would have been good enough, but in general it does a good job of keeping you at a proper distance from the car in front of you and keeping you going at speed with the traffic, and that is why I think the technology is really cool, and there’s a couple things that I want to talk about from that perspective.
The first thing I want to talk about is safety.
I think from a driving perspective, from looking at driving on freeways, looking at traffic, there’s the idea that a car is paying attention, that there’s a camera looking always at the traffic in front of you, which as a driver you can get distracted.
If there’s kids in the car, if there’s other things going on around, whatever it may be, there are times where we get distracted as drivers, and having that adaptive cruise control on means that the car is always paying attention, even when you are not.
And so I think there’s a real safety factor involved in that.
The other thing is driving is tiring.
There’s a fatigue that happens when you drive, and when you have adaptive cruise control, it really lowers that fatigue because you’re not constantly thinking about going forward, stepping back, stepping on your brake, not braking, doing all those things, and you can really focus on the environment around you, you can focus on what other cars may be doing, and it actually helps the fatigue of driving in heavy traffic.
So I think the other thing that I think is that traffic would be significantly less problematic if adaptive cruise control was a requirement.
If somehow the government could say every car has to have adaptive cruise control, and every driver has to turn it on, then you would not have people cutting in front of other people because the adaptive cruise control only reacts so quickly.
You would not have people braking so hard that the car behind them can’t react fast enough, and then you end up with accidents.
You would not have 5 mile an hour, 10 mile an hour, 15 mile an hour, then you go back to 5, then you’re going 50, then you’re going 10.
That would go away because traffic would all flow at the same speed.
So that is my opinion.
That is my experience.
And I do not wish to ever drive a car any distance in any kind of traffic that does not have adaptive cruise control.
You have been listening to the Technology Bites microcast.
Until next time, continue enjoying your technology.
