Cruisin' for a Bruisin'

Adaptive cruise control is an amazing feature.  Like some Ron Popeil gadget you just "set it and forget it."  With a battery of sensors, and possibly a little black magic, the system automatically adjusts your speed according to the traffic around you.  In the Lincoln MKT Ford so generously loaned to us, this gee-whiz technology can even slow you down to 18 miles an hour if the traffic in front of you locks up its brakes or some jackass pulls out right in front of you.  Stopping the vehicle is still your responsibility.  

Altogether the system works amazingly well, when it wants to.  Our pre-production Lincoln crossover had a few "issues," to put it politely, and one of the most annoying, irritating and downright infuriating had to do with the cruise control.  The damn thing only worked when it wanted to.  Every so often -- roughly 30 minutes or an hour -- the system would cut out and a message would flash in the instrument cluster "DRIVER INTERVENTION REQUIRED" followed by "COLLISION WARN NOT AVAILABLE." 10 frustrating minutes later the thing would work again!  Talk about annoying! This electronic anomaly would be fine on a quick jaunt to the local grocery store but on a 34-plus hour road trip it's not fun.  Hopefully this isn't an issue on production vehicles equipped with the technology.

~ Craig, Somewhere in Wisconsin

Posted via email from roundabout's posterous

Comments

[Rich]

I know you'll tell me off, but generously was spelled wrong.

[Craig A. Cole]

The spell-checker on the word processing program I used on Ben's iPad is no good. There were several other mistakes as well.