Rip Van Winkle Tries Cruise Control

Miles Driven: 4,607
Feature Tested: Adaptive Cruise Control
Randy’s Rating: 9/10

For me, taking the wheel of a 2019 XC90 was a bit of a Rip Van Winkle experience. For 16 years, I’d slept through the technology advancements sweeping through the automotive industry while I piled up nearly 200,000 miles on my trusty 2003 GMC. Automatic braking? Hah. Head-up display? No way.

Among the convenience features on the Volvo, one I was particularly looking forward to trying was adaptive cruise control. Like most of you, I suffer through my fair share of stop-and-go traffic, especially on Friday rush hours around Harrisburg en route to Penn State’s University Park campus. Brake, throttle. Brake, throttle. The idea of automating this tedium was appealing, and I was eager to find out if the feature worked as advertised.

It does. Wonderfully in most applications. But it’s not perfect in stop-and-go traffic.

Let me explain.

Set your cruise control as you approach a long line of bumper-to-bumper traffic inching down the road, and your Volvo will dutifully begin to brake as traffic slows (or even stops), and accelerate as traffic gets moving again. You do not need to apply throttle or brake manually.

What this technology lacks, at least for now, is the ability to look beyond the car ahead of you to anticipate what’s going to happen next. Suppose, for example, you’re in a long line of traffic, and the car immediately in front of you has allowed a gap of two or three vehicle lengths to grow between it and the pickup truck just ahead of it. Seeing this, the lackadaisical driver of the car suddenly speeds up to close the gap.

In this situation, the adaptive cruise control will logically follow along, quickly accelerating to keep pace with the car ahead of you. And, two seconds later, it will just as quickly apply the brakes once the offending gap in traffic has been closed.

Now imagine that you were controlling the throttle and brake manually. Perched in your SUV, you could see over the car in front of you to the pickup truck in front of it—and the long line of traffic ahead of the pickup truck. When the car ahead quickly accelerated, you could feather the throttle ever so slightly if you wished to slowly keep pace, and ease off once you’d caught up, probably never needing the brakes at all. The transition would be far smoother than the abrupt start and stop triggered by the adaptive cruise control.

Picture this scenario happening over and over again in bumper-to-bumper traffic, and you can imagine your ride becoming a little more herky-jerky than you’d like. By being able to see farther ahead than the next vehicle, a driver controlling throttle and brake manually can anticipate when to smartly step on the accelerator and when to ignore it based on the traffic conditions ahead. The net result: a smoother ride.

That said, I use the adaptive cruise control in my XC90 often. On a highway where traffic is flowing freely, and where the car ahead of you may be traveling slower than you but isn’t often braking, it’s incredibly helpful. And accurate. It allows you to click off mile after mile with little thought to brake or throttle. And if you’ve set the speed responsibly, you needn’t worry about absentmindedly incurring a speeding ticket.

Overall, I really like adaptive cruise control. It’s a great technology, and far superior to the old static cruise control on my GMC.