How do you figure that decreasing your follow distance increases fuel efficiency? Even an extra 30 feet b/w you and the car ahead of you while traveling at 70 mph means you’ll arrive 0.3 seconds later than you would have otherwise.

One hears manufacturers and others describe “safer” cars and trucks, but it’s not really true. It only means that the vehicle is less likely to injure the operator and passengers than other designs.

Let’s make every motor vehicle require operators to sit in a structure surrounded by clear plastic, with allowances for greenhouse heating, of course, so that every collision results in injury to the operator. Since all vehicles will be so equipped, every operator will exercise great care to avoid crashes.

Yep, that’s utopian again, isn’t it?

Its neat and it works well. The offramp situation is simple though; make sure you hit the brakes. If for instance you follow another car on an offramp though the car will slow itself down.

Where I think this systems will cause problems however is in that it will make people who already dont pay attention, pay less attention. When driving on a highway with this system on you dont have to do anything except stay in the lane, it makes already monotonous highway driving even worse.

It is also a little annoying on the highways up here in Toronto because it leaves a large enough gap that EVERYONE thinks you are leaving a large enough gap for them to move into, so you are constantly being cut off and slowed down automatically.

Really though I do think these systems are pointless. As it just removes that extra bit of attention required to operate the gas and brake.

I’ve heard that most cruise controls accelerate more slowly than is useful for maximum fuel efficiency, and if it would brake quickly enough you could decrease your follow distance and increase fuel efficiency.