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Comment by endianswap | Hacker News Reader

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endianswap·

That's not typical for cruise control; even cars in the 80s with cruise control would increase throttle uphills.

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Agreed. I don't think any modern car works on a fixed throttle.

2009 Pontiac and a 2013 Fiat, so relatively modern.

Couple of possibilities then, I suppose:

* They do work towards a set speed, but I'm too impatient and reset the cruise control before they achieve it.

* Cruise control operates differently on cars with manual transmissions. I've never actually observed cruise control behavior in an automatic because it's been broken on the automatics I've previously owned.

I have a 2001 Porsche Boxster (manual transmission). It will maintain speed as long as their is sufficient torque to do so in the current gear (or engine braking depending on uphill or down hill).

Is it possible that you don't have much excess engine power at highway cruising speed and the car is only slowly responding to change in incline?

Quite possible! I'm currently in Kansas or I'd be out finding some hills right now to test this further.

Which is and always has been a downright awful and dangerous feature. Going up a steep hill? Put the pedal to the metal so we can fly past other cars at 65 MPH.

You're really describing a more general issue with traditional cruise control and one of the reasons I rarely use it, especially on roads with any amount of traffic. Cruise control encourages you to keep to a set speed even when that makes you deviate from keeping in the flow of traffic.

Or would be a lot safer and more efficient if everyone just went a constant speed on the freeways. My cruise control also operates he brakes so my set speed is held going up and down hills.

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