Myth Busting: Can you use cruise control in the wet?
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The tire tread washes water away, and that’s what keeps contact between the tire and the ground. If you have too much water where the tire can’t wash it away, so you lose contact between the tread and the ground, and the car will skid or yaw when that happens. The internet is really useful for many things, ranging from letting your wi-fi enabled refrigerator to blast Yoo-Hoo ads 24/7 to letting you play Canasta with a naked man halfway across the world.
Driving in the rain: 8 expert tips for the safest ride in a storm. - Frankenmuth Insurance
Driving in the rain: 8 expert tips for the safest ride in a storm..
Posted: Wed, 24 Apr 2019 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Tips for driving safely in the rain
Besides maintaining speeds and following distances, modern adaptive cruise control can stop before traffic and slow down in curves. Wet-road driving is fraught with dangers that are not always immediately apparent. Just a thin layer of water lying on pavement can send an unsuspecting car hydroplaning into another lane — the car's wheels skim along the water's surface instead of making contact with the road. Also, roads constantly accumulate oily substances loosed by car exhaust, and this residue settles deep into the pavement. Rain brings this oil back to the surface, making roads especially slippery during that first hour of downpour or misting. Conventional cruise control doesn’t use cameras or radars to sense the presence of another car or vehicle ahead of yours.
Don’t Drive into the water
This can cause your vehicle to hydroplane out of control when you least expect it to. While the technology in cruise control has been improved over the years it is still a somewhat unintelligent system. Cruise control is designed to make sure that your vehicle maintains a certain speed regardless of what kind of road surface you are driving on.
Slow down and turn off cruise control
So when raindrops fall or snow accumulates, human inputs are essential to avoid car accidents. So, how does cruise control measure the speed of the vehicle? A vehicle’s speed is generally measured via either the driveshaft or transmission. And, so, cruise control is measuring the speed of the driven wheels. And here is the key, if your vehicle begins to aquaplane on a wet road and the wheels begin rotating faster, then cruise control will release the throttle to slow down the vehicle to the pre-set speed. You may have brand new tires, they can also slip on the road surface if you are driving on wet roads.
I had a wreck a couple of weeks ago and totaled our Lincoln Town Car. I hydroplaned on Hwy 135 between Gladewater & Kilgore, Texas. To provide you with real-world car reviews, car news, and car buying advice to help make buying a car easier. Does your car’s engine seem to have a mind of its own revving in park or neutral without you touching the accelerator? Avoid any area of the road where you can see the water has accumulated.
Even if it is not raining it’s still not a good idea to use your cruise control on wet roads. This is especially true in the fall time when there could be wet leaves on the road. Even if it is not raining at that time a wet road surface can cause your tires to slip especially if your tires are worn down or bald. Since hydroplaning lifts the tires, there’s less friction due to the loss of contact with the road, and the wheels spin faster.
Increase your visibility by turning on your headlights
This is nice because you never have to worry about messing with adjusting your cruise control to match the speed of vehicles in front of you, your vehicle will do that for you. One new technology that has recently come out is called adaptive cruise control. Adaptive cruise control allows your vehicle to lock onto the vehicle in front of you and follow the vehicle in front of you at whatever distance you choose. With that said there are some people that are in the hyper mile community that can get a higher mile per gallon result if they use the gas pedal themselves.
When driving in icy conditions, you risk slipping and eventually spinning out of control. These rainy weather safety tips will help commercial drivers. Yet, the person in the driver seat doesn’t need to be solely responsible for safe driving in challenging weather conditions. Motive’s fleet safety solution maps weather conditions in fleet view and helps fleet managers plan the entire route in advance with safety in mind, simplifying the process of vehicle fleet management. What does cruise control have to do with aquaplaning and travelling faster than the pre-set speed?
If you have traction control and electronic stability control enabled in your car, using cruise control is extremely safe. Cruise control makes hydroplaning worse by trying to keep your vehicle going at a constant speed. You can disable it by applying your brakes, but if you do not have anti-lock brakes, hitting your brakes while hydroplaning will only worsen the skidding. You can disable it by applying your brakes, but if you do not have anti-lock brakes, hitting your brakes while hydroplaning will only make the skidding worse.
When accelerating, turning, braking, or steering in the rain, drive smoothly to retain maximum control. Make gradual speed or steering changes, and start slowing your vehicle by taking your foot off the gas earlier than you normally would before gently squeezing the brake pedal. There are instances when using cruise control in the rain is not catastrophic.
Or, in snow and ice, vehicles may lose traction, resulting in a skid into another lane or a spin off the road. It could also result in a driver slamming on the brakes and getting rear-ended. Now you should have a better understanding of why you shouldn’t use cruise control in bad weather. While cruise control systems are used as an aid for drivers to get better miles per gallon while driving they are not intelligent enough to be able to cut power to the drive wheels of your car if you lose traction. Even driving in light rain changes the conditions as the roads grow slicker.
Of course, for most drivers, if you’re begin to feel like the amount of acceleration is unsafe, a simple tap on the brake will kick cruise off, no problem. So, unless something is wrong with your cruise control system, if you’re using it in the rain and you encounter a situation where the car begins to lose control, the cruise control system will be turned off immediately. What that’s saying is that as soon as a car on cruise in heavy rain begins to hydroplane or skid or experience some other loss of control, cruise control kicks off. Continental is a developer and supplier of cruise control systems for a number of automakers. The big splash you get when you drive through a huge puddle can be costly. If water enters the engine compartment of your vehicle, it can damage the internal systems.
The general recommendation is reducing normal speeds by a third in wet conditions. Contrary to what some people believe, cruise control won’t cause overspeeding in the rain, and the car will maintain the speed you select. However, there are a few safety issues that you must consider seriously. If water is covering the markings on the road, it’s too deep to drive on. You can lose control with as little as three inches of water on the road. And even if you manage to stay in control, a larger vehicle could push some of that water underneath your car, causing your engine to stall.
This, in turn, allows your vehicle to get more miles per gallon out of that tank of gas which saves you money in the long run. A car or vehicle ahead of you is also at risk of hydroplaning in the rain, among other hazards. A conventional cruise control system won’t assess any obstacles or traffic ahead, creating a potential collision if the car in front brakes, stops, or even reduces its speed for any reason.
Cruise control increases the chance of hydroplaning because the feature maintains a consistent speed. We tell our teenagers to set the cruise control and drive a safe speed – but we don’t tell them to use the cruise control only when the road is dry. Cruise control also limits your ability to make immediate decisions. While maneuvering on highways in normal conditions, lowering speed is a matter of easing off the gas pedal. With cruise control, you are locked in at a constant speed and have less time to reduce your speed. Cruise control gives many drivers a sense of security when driving on the road, from utilizing less gas to helping maintain a constant speed.
So, if you do want to use cruise control in the wet, go for it, but just like you would if you weren’t using it, set the speed a little lower than the signposted limit. And make sure your tyres are in good condition and inflated to the correct pressure. If you do see a patch of ice that you cannot avoid it’s good to slow down before you hit the ice patch so that you will have more control of your vehicle when you hit the ice patch.
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