Active Cruise Control or sometimes known as Adaptive Cruise Control is very much like cruise control but is more autonomous.
With normal cruise control you simply set the speed you wish to go at and the car will maintain that speed until you touch the accelerator or the brake pedal.
How Does Active Cruise Control Work?
Active cruise control is very much like cruise control when you are setting it up. To start with you have to set the speed in which you want to go at, like normal cruise control. What makes it Active or Adaptive is that when you are coming up behind traffic, you can set the car to maintain a gap to the traffic in front.
On Ford vehicles this can be set up in ‘Bars’. 4 bars being the furthest point it will follow from and 1 bar being the closest.
Regardless of the speed you have set the car to go at, once the car is within the parameters for the active cruise control to work, it will slow down if the vehicle in front is going slower. If the vehicle in front is going slower and then exceeds the speed you have set, the car will speed up to the speed that you set and will no longer follow the car in front.
Will active cruise control stop my car?
On Automatic vehicles and more up to date versions of active cruise control, the car will bring you to a complete stop and then accelerate again when traffic starts moving again. However, it is best advised that if you can see the traffic has stopped in front of you, that you then take control of the car by manually braking to avoid an incident.
