I rented a RAV4 recently for not one but two cross-US trips (Seattle <-> VA). Its adaptive cruise control (like its lane assist) felt mostly familiar from previ

I rented a RAV4 recently for not one but two cross-US trips (Seattle <-> VA). Its adaptive cruise control (like its lane assist) felt mostly familiar from previous rentals. It takes a lot of getting used to, if you’re from a time when cars just mechanically do what you tell them (failure modes aside). That said, I have the almost opposite take! The adaptive CC wasn’t perfect, but it had a perfect failure mode all but one time: it just stopped working at all when its sensors got fudged in any way. The one exception was a near pileup when drivers ahead of me came to a sudden stop in the middle of an urban ramp soup that’s always high risk. Even then it did the right thing: it screamed (beeped) at me to brake, because I needed to control that and it had no safe way of doing it for me. I’m similarly more vigilant with assisted CC, but I’m more inclined to use it because it makes me more vigilant. I almost never used a plain CC without it because it’s too easy to get lazy at the wheel and make mistakes. Constantly checking on the known-limited computer kept me alert but let me rest my legs for ~10k miles over a month and a half. And it saved my ass on a sudden ice patch in Nevada, which was the other time it didn’t work exactly as expected. I don’t drive with a computer in control, I only delegate to it for menial tasks like predictable speed adjustment. But I’m grateful I had the computer to help me regain traction coming around an icy bend when the alternative was me and my pup and everything we had in tow were going to roll off a mountainside.