Comment by cmroanirgo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmroanirgo | Hacker News Reader

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I remember an engineering class at uni in the early 90's discussing how cruise control worked, and was borderline horrified at the childish simplicity of the design. In all this time, I've probably used it 1/2 dozen times, because my trust level is very low.

Just the other day I was a passenger in a Peugot and it was raining very heavily. Cruise control automatically disabled when one of the tyres suddenly bogged down due to heavy water on the road causing the car to lurch.

Until these systems look at and analyse the road and traffic like we do, I see little hope in an automated system that wasn't deadly by design. For me the number 1 litmus test is to read the slope of the road: if about to go uphill- more gas required, about to hit a crest- back off and maybe allow engine braking.

It's been almost 30 years, you might want to revisit that decision.

Sometimes simple designs are good. Older cruise control designs are quite primitive but very effective. Nothing but a simple feedback loop. Car not fast enough? More gas. Too fast? Less gas. The smarter ones (probably ones with electronic transmissions) would even downshift to keep under the preset speed.

I bet the earliest ones were all mechanical too.

Of all the features in a vehicle, I don’t think you need to worry about “standard” cruise control.

Sorry but using cruise control in heavy rain is just simply a bad idea. It's supposed to be used when conditions are ideal, not when they as bad as can be. That is human error, in my opinion.

In my driver’s education course back in the early 2000s, they explicitly told us that Cruise Control can dangerously malfunction in rain and should only be used on dry roads.

How is it any more idiotic than maintaining that speed manually?

I'm struggling to think of any combination of hardware/software that isn't asinine on first glance (e.g. feed the cruise control off only the rear wheel speed sensors on a FWD vehicle) where cruise control would be any different than a driver manually holding the same speed by putting their foot on the gas.

I don’t think a normal human would try to maintain an unsafe speed going uphill in heavy rain.

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