“Now, something connected with the technology of autonomous emergency braking, which is the radar that looks out the front of your car. Have a look at near the radiator grill of cars in the car park and whatever. Don’t look creepy and suspicious. Just go notice them. If you see a black rectangle of plastic, that is probably the radar detector behind the radiator grill. That’s looking out as your driving to see what’s going on, what’s going on in front of you.
Now, that system is connected to the cruise control to produce a system called adaptive cruise control and adaptive cruise control works on several things. It looks at your speed. It looks at the car or the vehicle in front and works out what the safe separation distance is. Some of them are clever enough to know that if your windscreen wipers are on then it’s wet and to increase that distance and so forth.
So, the idea is therefore that as the traffic in front pulls away from you, your car accelerates to keep up with that faster moving traffic, albeit at a greater distance, and as the traffic in front of you, perhaps on a motorway or dual carriageway, the flow of traffic, everything slows down a bit, your car will then start slowing down and adjusting the separation distance between you and the car in front, which is really good. And, especially if you’ve got an automatic car because you don’t even need to bother about any gear changes.
So you could be tooting in at 60, 65 or 70 mph and the traffic flow slows down arguably to a halt and your automatic car, therefore your electric car as well if you’ve got an electric car, will simply pull up and then, as the traffic starts flowing again, you’ll start going again.
If you’ve got a manual car, you would have to address gear changes throughout that process. But it’s really clever idea and you need to practice and work out how these things work. Get some advice from an instructor if you need some help.”
