Hi all,

Recently drove from Switzerland to the United Kingdom, and had a great deal of fog.

The French motorway (highway) are great so I popped the car into ACC, and low and behold what a GREAT tool in fog! Especially near Dover when the visibility came down to 50 feet! Although still need to be careful, certainly helps when the car in front, that you can barely see, lifts off without braking, and even just with FCW, saved me missing a corner by "lighting up" a post on the road side...

But.. unfortunately the sensor got hit by gravel from a snow plow in France on the way back, and I need to get it repaired.

It was an otherwise great long distance journey, no problems and very, very comfortable.

Love this car

 

Wow, thanks for the info. My first Dodge brand car. It is a great car.

 

I've been impressed with it as well, though I haven't tried it in heavy fog yet. Doesn't seem to be any false alerts, which I thought there might be (given all the variables on the road).

Cool to hear of some Dodge products roaming Europe as well :-)

 

That's great to hear. I never thought about using ACC in the fog to help with other vehicles.

I'll tell you what though, the automatic high beams work great as well. I was up in the mountains this last week and the auto high beams worked great. Love the feature and used it a lot while on some dark mountain roads.

 

I've had ACC in several cars now and I can't speak highly enough about it. Particularly given all the distractions today (whether you think you have them or not), it can be a life saver. This technology is also going to be the basis of future automated highways. The automation will actually be in the car rather than the road.

You mention a pole on the side of the road. The system will usually not respond to stationary objects, or those moving towards you (like oncoming traffic), otherwise it would be going off constantly. The Dodge unit is a little less sophisticated than others, but still works very well. It was one of the primary reasons I looked at this vehicle.

Someone mentioned the auto high beams. I like the idea, and for country/mountain driving where it's very dark they probably work a lot better. In standard suburban driving I found them to be too sensitive to things I wish it would ignore.

 

All good points, as for the pole, in Switzerland we have poles at the side of the road, literally at the edge to indicated the edge of road in case of snow.

I have found that their position so close to the edge can set off the brake warning in turns where the front of the DD approaches them "too" closely. Otherwise not a lot of false alarms.

 

I've never thought much of ACC and thought it was just a luxury feature one overpaid a lot to get. Well, I'm now very glad that it came standard on the Citadel.

It has impressed me very much with how it has dealt with traffic. I've heard of the reasons not to get it, false detection, curves, etc. Either I'm lucky or those reasons are getting blown out of proportion.

1) One motorcyle in front? Check, detected and slowed down.

2) A row of semi's in the right lane? Check, not detected, didn't slow down.

3) Fast car passing me on left, they immediately cut right in front of me, I though it was going to brake, but it never did. Maybe it's smart to know they were accelerating away from me?

4) Curves? Hard to tell. I haven't noticed an issue but most likely I just haven't hit the right situation yet. The reasoning behind what will happen on a curve is sound and it will probably happen at some time or another.

Before I would never use cruise control going through downtown orlando on I-4. ACC handled it with ease.

I'm very impressed with the level of braking that it will apply if needed. Enough to make you notice, not enough to freak you out. It's not as advanced as systems like Volvo or Mercedes. Volvo's system will bring you to a complete stop if necessary, but people have reported falses, and sudden braking to a stop in the middle of intersections!!! Maybe sometimes too much is just too much. I won't mind the volvo or mercedes system 5 years down the road from now when all those people have worked out the bugs.

Even the acceleration impressed me. Got stuck behind a slow car, couldn't change lanes and when I finally could and I changed over, the engine actually downshifted as she took off!

I only wish is was easier to activate!!! I'd use it more often. What would be really cool is if they could just tie it to the speed limits that the garmin GPS knows are for that road, give me a custom setting for adjusting how much over the limit I'm willing to go and then with one press, just have it on!

 

I like the idea of tieing it to the speed limit, that would be cool.

What's really strange on the Dodge system is that they allow you to go back to old fashion cruise mode. I imagine someone in corporate thought that some people might still like to do that. Personally, I think it's dangerous. And once you get used to ACC, there's no going back to regular CC, it's simply too dangerous.

 

Standard cruise remains because not every D is equipped with FCW and ACC and if the FCW/ACC has a fault and shuts down, you still have a working cruise control.

 

I still wouldn't go back to the old system. The only time my last ACC system shutdown was because of heavy fog/snow/rain, and in those conditions it was likely better not to be using any CC. I understand that some Ds don't have ACC, but they only need to CC buttons. The ACC equipped models should only need the ACC buttons. By the time my kids are driving they wont know what "standard" CC is. All cars will have ACC standard.