Cruise Controls Cut Out When You Need Them Most
When I drive, I use the cruise control to keep me from speeding. I set up the car to go exactly the posted speed limit, so I can pay attention to traffic rather than monitoring my speed. Even though it annoys all the drivers around me, it works pretty well: I haven't gotten a speeding ticket since 1983. But there's a problem: school zones. Sometime in the hazy past when software was just beginning to take over mundane tasks from custom analog and digital circuitry, the person who was given the task of programming the cruise control thought that it should not engage until the car reached a speed of 25mph. But school zones have a speed limit of 20mph, and this is where you need cruise control the most. As you drive through a school zone, 100% of your attention should be devoted to not running over the little kiddies and 0% of your attention should go to looking at your speedometer. To make matters worse, one time in five there's a police car posted at one end or the other wit...