Adaptive Cruise Disabled in Snow?

Snow and cruise control? Yea, No!

 

you might be mistaking normal adapative cc behavior with gear hunting. try playing around with the adaptive sensitivity to see if it makes a difference. i find i need to cut that back sometimes when there are lots of adjacent semis on the road. i can imagine other scenarios like narrow tree dense twistie roads.

 

Lol, had plenty of drives with clean roads but crap piling up on the truck.

I may be wrong but I thought any activation of the stability system also disengaged cruise.

 

There's a 15 foot long banner outside one of our truck terminals. It pithily reads, "The most dangerous phrase in the English language is 'but I've always done it this way'." The safety manager had it posted so that every time a trucker tries to tell him how much experience they have, he just points to the sign.


I'm squarely in camp no-cruise-control. Not in rain, not in snow, not when towing, and not in traffic. These days I use it less often than my high beams. There ain't nothing wrong with your foot. I pull week long crosscountry road trips twice a year. No cruise when towing. My foot survives the week just fine.

I'm also squarely in camp don't-hang-out-next-to-someone's-fender-in-the-next-lane. Because you squirrelly fuckers are going to continue doing whatever it is you do.

 

Yep, we’re Canadian and lived in Tennessee for a couple of years. They’d occasionally get about an inch of snow and all the locals would lose their minds. The grass on the lawns would still be poking through the snow but the schools would close and everyone would go stock-up on groceries. We’d just be driving around as normal, enjoying the pretty scenery and lack of traffic....

My adaptive radar has stopped working a few times (from snow and dirt) but a quick finger wipe always gets it going again. I’ve also found that RainX-ing it makes it less likely to shut down.

Like @hiPSI said, if you know how to drive and you’re not distracted or an idiot, a bit of falling snow is no reason to stop using CC. IMO anyway....

 

Coming from the New England winters, living in Portland, OR is hilarious. "Snowmaggedan" recently with several inches of snow. Anything over 1 inch predicted closes schools. In fairness, they do not invest in snow removal equipment. Visiting Boston area in a snow storm years ago I spied an impressive number of plows keeping it going.

My biggest surprise was on a job many years ago in Denver, Co. Those people had no idea how to drive in the snow. I did not expect that. Spinning wheels and fishtailing for no reason. I expected people near the Rockies would have some clue. Apparently even Denver has its flatlanders.

 

Mammoth Mountain, CA. Gnarly.

 

It's not that cruise control is going to make your car instantly invert on the highway, but that semi-autonomous systems tend to have the worst safety record. I don't know if I'll be able to find it, but I remember reading a study of manual flight systems with user aids, semi-autonomous systems where the computer usually takes care of some task but needs oversight from an operator, and autonomous systems where the operator might have emergency override capability but is in most cases hands off. The semi-autonomous system was worse by far because people don't really stay engaged monitoring things with long stretches of boredom in between.

As for me, I figure I've still got two feet that work good so I never bother turning it on.

 

I hardly consider cruise to be any level of autonomous system.

What cruise does for me is let me focus on the vehicles around me without worrying about my speed. I spend more time understanding what is happening with it on than if it's off. If it's off I have to add speed as a task to my list of things to do Division of responsibility and all that.

And before anyone gets huffy, yes, I can maintain speed. Still, if your speed varies more than the plus or minus 1/2 of one mile per hour the cruise can do, then you are failing. Absolute consistency. And cruise does that while I plan ahead of me, and more often what's behind me. If you don't know where you and the cars and front and the cars behind you are going to intersect, then you are doing it wrong

 

I mean, you're free to define it how you want, but I'm just telling you what I understand and that's exactly the sort of systems that they referred to as "semi-autonomous." The adaptive system is just another driver aid that frees your mind from having to worry about the distance to oncoming traffic and braking. The problem arises when you have to make a context switch and need to spend less time understanding that other stuff and go back to spending time thinking about your speed. Division of responsibility is division of attention. If I'm responsible for the fry station, I'm not going to be paying attention to the register as closely as someone who works up front.

I'd bet dollars to donuts that none of those pilots thought they'd perform worse when they need to babysit a machine that lets them concentrate on more important stuff, but I don't have any way of knowing that. What I do know is that once I got a dashcam and started paying attention to what I was doing while driving, that I looked away from the road a hell of a lot more than I thought I did.

 

When snow is blowing around in the air is the same as heavy rain and fog ... too many surprises exist to count on fate/chance for the driver to complete their cycling through the mirrors, cell phone, radio settings, etc before they finally maybe work to detect (in the brief period they allow) what is in the fog or between the snowflakes or beyond the sight range that rains allow.

For me cruise control is a convenience for times when you can see clearly but want to rest your leg. Radar cruise control just adds the extra convenience of automatically adjusting speed when those in front change speed.

"Convenience under clear conditions" is the key thought. Too many want it to drive for them and assume it is a better driver than they are ... NO I WILL NOT APOLOGIZE FOR THAT.

Subaru has a "lane keep" system that will allow drivers to take their hands off the wheel and it will self-guide. Ford is releasing a self-drive that will let people sleep while the car does all of the thinking (hell ... someone has to think between the supposed-driver and the car!).

Phoenix has at least 3 firms now that operate driverless taxis/Uber-like services. These services scare me ... computers making decisions that should belong to humans.

I am sure the "30+ years in the UP of Michigan" drivers will say that cruise control on roads cold enough to freeze the snow blowing in the air at 70 MPH is perfectly safe. Or others will say "lets me keep track of all of the other cars instead of my speed". Driving is the main task, not other things you want to have time for at 70 MPH in 5600+ lb missiles.

 

I'm always worried about my speed, I'm just not worried about maintaining it.

You said it, if you are worried about the fry station you are not worried about the register. If you are worried about maintaining your speed then there is something else you are not monitoring.

 

From what I've seen over the last two days now are that adaptive cruise definitely drops between 6th and 3rd on steep or long run hills. Old style cruise has yet to go below 4th on the same hills.

 

That the top of the ski lift in the foreground?

 

You should really only be using cruise in dry pavement.

 

I believe it is. People are going to be camping in snow down below in the camping areas…in August/September no doubt.

We camped once in the Southern Sierra in early June with snow on the ground.

 

Worst part of it all is the snow has nowhere to go! The Sierra Nevada range is getting pounded.

 

Found out a cool deal this morning. When cruise is controlled, you can go in increments of one up or down on the settings for mph. I thought it was only “hold and shit, too much!”

 

My 2007 Corolla had that. Bump that stalk up or down one and speed changed by 1 MPH. My Grand Am and Grand Prix several years ago.

 

damn, you'd probably be dead if that snow decided to fall