Standard cruise control has been around for some time and can be particularly useful on stretches of motorway or clear roads where you have a speed limit to stick to.
The issue with standard cruise control is that if the road is busy you will undoubtedly need to break to slow the car down which will usually disable the cruise control. In a row of traffic that’s speeding up and slowing down regularly this can get pretty annoying and it can be easier to just control the car yourself.
However we now have a new bit of technology, adaptive cruise control and this is a pretty sophisticated bit of kit! You set the cruise control to a certain speed, for example 50MPH in a speed camera controlled area, this is the max speed that the car will do if the road is clear, you then set the following distance and this means that if there is a car in front who is slower than you your car will automatically drop back to a safe following distance. Once the car is out of the way your car will automatically accelerate to the pre-set speed again. Pretty nifty!