Adaptive cruise control FTW. Matches speed with the person ahead of me (up to the max that I set) and maintains a gap that I can specify. It starts slowing down long before I’d notice the gap closing if I were doing it myself, so the +/- acceleration is a lot smoother as a result.
kryptonianCodeMonkey@lemmy.world 10 hours ago
So, I don’t know exactly how the adaptive cruise control works. But if it is slowing down and speeding up to maintain a specific distance, that does not fix things. The idea is to maintain a specific speed such that, as the people in front of you accelerate and brake, speed up and slow down, you have enough distance to not have to do that. You should essentially match their average speed with enough gap that their braking doesn’t put them close enough to your bumper that you have to slow down yourself. Normal cruise control would be better (except mine won’t set at speeds under, I think, 20mph) because your speed wont change. Adaptive cruise would make your drive safer, maybe, keeping you from being too close or failing to react to the change in traffic speeds, but I dont think it would solve the traffic issue itself.
Omgpwnies@lemmy.world 8 hours ago
It’s not “locked” to a specific distance, it’s fairly elastic and the exact follow distance varies based on speed. So, if traffic slows down, it will gradually close the gap while also slowing down. The end result then is far less drastic speed changes.
aesthelete@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
You aren’t solving traffic as an individual driver anyway. Sorry to burst everyone’s atomized bubble here but that’s complete nonsense.
If you manually maintain a large gap in front of you, everyone behind you becomes complete weirdos.
We could “solve traffic” by not requiring single occupant car drives to accomplish everything in our daily lives.