JAGUAR ADAPTIVE CRUISE CONTROL

Adaptive Cruise Control with Intelligent Emergency Brake and Active Seat Belts will set you back a hefty £1,275 on the XF. Its purpose is to maintain a set cruising speed whilst still remaining at a safe distance behind any vehicle in front of you. It does this using a sensor located beneath the front bumper that monitors the traffic ahead of the car. Once the cruising speed has been set by the driver, the car will maintain that speed unless the system senses a slower car in front. In this situation it will reduce speed and maintain a constant safe distance behind the vehicle. Once the road is clear again, it will accelerate back up to the pre-set cruise speed. The Intelligent Emergency Brake uses the same sensor and if it detects that a collision is imminent, it will prepare the brakes to minimise the speed of any impact.

Adaptive Cruise Control is a very sophisticated system and is likely to be a prelude to even more advanced systems in the future that will eventually help to eliminate human error in driving situations. The issue currently is that drivers need to have the confidence to put their trust in these types of applications. At motorway speeds for example, it does take quite a leap of faith to trust the technology, but the more we use them the more confident and accepting we will become. It certainly can make long journeys a far more relaxing experience.

The downside however is that systems like Adaptive Cruise Control also highlight just how bad other people's driving can be! We've all experienced the annoying and potentially dangerous tailgater. Drivers who think that positioning their vehicle twenty feet from the rear bumper of the car in front at 70mph is a safe and acceptable way to drive. The wider use of systems like Adaptive Cruise Control can only help to reduce the incidents of this dangerous practise.

This is not the first version of Adaptive Cruise Control for Jaguar as it first appeared in the S-Type and was far less sophisticated. In that version, the car could appear to accelerate very fast before reaching the vehicle in front and then braking excessively. Once the road was clear again, the system would then accelerate the car very hard to regain its set cruising speed. As you can imagine, this sequence of events didn't make for a very comfortable or relaxing drive!

Jaguar has now refined the system quite extensively making it far more useable and comfortable. It may not be as good as Audi's comparable system but it is still an impressive piece of kit. Its current weakness however, is on bends whe...