The Tech Behind Your Car's Adaptive Cruise Control

A radar sensor and a camera, that’s it.

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Somewhere in the world right now, a car that nobody's feet are actively in control of has noticed the truck ahead of it is slowing, and eased off by itself. That's adaptive cruise control. For most of the last three decades, it's a technology that has fundamentally come down to a hidden radar in the car's nose, joined over the last decade or so by a camera behind the rearview mirror.