Dynamic cruise control

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Dynamic Cruise Control and Brake Lights - Toyota Nation Forum : Toyota Car and Truck Forums

 

The brake lights do come on, but only when you exceed approximately the amount of braking you would get from "B mode". I wish Toyota had an indicator for brake lights like Subaru has with their Eyesight system.

 

I've found people completely lose their minds following me when I use the adaptive cruise in stop-n-go traffic. It's like they think the closer they are to the car in front of them the faster they are going, and if I'm not doing the same I'm somehow slowing them down.

While I don't really care what they think, or if they are ticked off by my driving, I also don't want some idiot getting "Bruce Banner" on me so I change the following distance from the default 3 to 2 or rarely 1 when speeds are 45 or lower. Even then if someone is getting obviously upset I'll accelerate a bit faster than the cruise does from a stop. The cruise seems to want to let the car ahead get to the cruising speed following distance before it speeds up much.

Yes the brake lights come on, don't know if it's at the same point they would come on when manually braking.

 

Adaptive cruise is great when traffic is flowing but it really isn't designed for stop-and-go or suburb streets. I mean it does have that warning when you turn on cruise control too. I noticed it keeps pace pretty well when you're driving along at speed and some minor slow downs but once it gets to stopping in rush hour it isn't as helpful. In stop and go I noticed it will wait to brake until later than I would prefer and since it waited longer to start, it brakes harder. It's almost like you're brake checking the guy behind you every time traffic drops from 30-40mph back down to 10mph or less. It also likes to come to a pretty hard stop instead of easing into a stop when cars stop in front of me. if I try to inch up it by using the accelerator it is pretty aggressive at applying the brakes again making some jerking stops.

 

I really like it in stop and go traffic, but it could use some optimization. I usually set it to "1" distance if traffic isn't going too fast, but if traffic gets too far ahead I'll have to increase the distance or take over to avoid hard braking.

When it's parked it stops slightly too far back from cars, no matter what the distance is set to. Maybe that is in case there is a flatbed truck in front of you.

If you set the drive mode to Normal or PWR it accelerates faster than in Eco mode. I usually just accelerate manually because it's always a bit too slow, and I prefer looking at the blue background in Eco mode.

I've tested it, and it can follow a car in front of you that's just barely inching forward, which is impressive. And sometimes I abuse it to use it as a brake hold feature, if I'm going to be stopped for a while and don't want to keep my foot on the brake. Some new cars have a button that does the same thing.

Having driven this and the Subaru Eyesight system (on a 2019 Crosstrek), I suspect Toyota is relying too much on radar and not quite enough on the camera. Subaru's system seems to be a bit more refined, but radar is probably a technically better way to sense ahead of the car since it works better in poor visibility. I wonder how much better TSS 2.0 is?

 

Maybe he spilled coffee on his lap.

Toyota’s dynamic cruise control can have problems with (heavy) rain weather and will disengage if you set the windshield wipers to fast. Somebody test this on TSS 2.0, or I guess I can find a TSS 2.0 equipped vehicle’s Owner’s manual and read up on it.

 

Same here. In my commuting, I've given up on the adaptive cruise. But I do use it in normal mode and that way I can control its behavior. We'll be making a long interstate trip in a few weeks. I'll try it again since everyone seems to be thrilled with it in those circumstances.

 

Methinks it has to do with the "fear of leaving enough space to allow adjacent lines of traffic to cut in front" syndrome: close it up, close it up... don't let those weenies get in! To be fair, little is as vexing as dealing with a driver trying to "thread the needle", darting back and forth between lanes showing off their white-knuckled slalom driving skills to get that extra vehicle length ahead of the rest of the well mannered pack.

 

Ahhh, Canada, that explains it... Canadians are uber-polite. Next time we make it to the Festival international de Jazz de Montréal, perhaps we can share a Labatt or three (no poutine for me though!)

 

I tested the cruise control in a mix of heavy snow, rain, and mist today. Visibility was a few hundred yards, and it was daytime. It was hard to see the car ahead of me, but I could see it. I had the cruise control set to "3 bars". but it couldn't see the car ahead of me at all, even as I got closer than the "1 bar" following distance and was closing in quickly. I had to brake to maintain a safe distance.

The time I first tested it it had just started snowing, so the sensor was probably not covered or maybe only lightly covered by snow. When I got home there was 1/4 inch of slush covering the radar sensor. By then visibility had improved to about 1/2 - 1 mile, but the dynamic part of cruise control still did not work.

I don't expect it to work when covered in snow and ice, but it should at least alert the driver when dynamic cruise control is unavailable/not working. And the sensor should be heated so it can continue to provide collision mitigation braking in icy weather. The area around the camera should be heated as well, since heat from the defroster doesn't make it behind the plastic shroud very quickly.

 

I don't think the radar can know when it's blind. If it doesn't see anything, how would it know if that's because it's blind or there's nothing there to see? But the heater is a great idea!

 

It should be able to see clutter from stuff by the side of the road, street signs, etc. moving towards the car at the speed you are driving. I would expect that the signal would change if it's covered in ice.

 

I never used DRCC during inclement weather, so I don't know how it warns if there is a warning. But on one snowy day, I got a warning message on my MID indicating Pre-collision avoidance system is not functioning. The warning directed to clean the radar. When I stopped at a store parking, the front side of the car was covered with a slush of snow/ice. After cleaning the TOYOTA emblem, I had no more warning message the rest of the way to home. So, there is definitely a warning system for pre-collision radar. I wonder why the same type of warning does not exist for DRCC?

 

That strongly depends on which portions of Canada you are comparing to which portions of the U.S.

E.g. plenty of BC-plated cars (drug runners? ) running through here between Vancouver and Los Angeles are rude compared to the locals, but polite compared to typical SoCal vehicles. They would be a better match to the Oregon or NorCal drivers.

 

I've seen a similar message when the camera is blocked. Maybe it wasn't quite bad enough for me to get a message for the radar? But it clearly wasn't working, so it should be able to alert the driver to that immediately.