Study: Adaptive Cruise Control Increases Road Accidents

Adaptive cruise control is a feature many drivers use, however a new study claims it’s at least associated with higher crash rates, if not causing accidents. It’s an interesting conjecture, something to give everyone pause before they use the technology during a trip.

The Chevy Blazer has been killed off, again.

This claim was made in a study published in Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives, an academic journal which covers the various aspects of personal, commercial, and mass transportation. The study published on January 29, 2025 takes a look at how driver assistance technologies impact accident rates.

The shocking conclusion is that while most driver assistance techs have a positive impact on vehicle crash rates, adaptive cruise control might be an outlier. Interestingly enough, regular cruise control was also found to correlate with higher accident rates.

We know correlation doesn’t equate to causation, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a relationship. You can read the study if you want to know all the details. For those who don’t want to or don’t have the time (it’s pretty dry stuff, after all) just know adaptive cruise control had a +8% effect on the accident rate and cruise control had a +12% effect.

Why might that be? That’s the big question we think people are going to be looking into after this study has been published. We have our own theories, but keep in mind these aren’t scientific conclusions.

Personally, we hate adaptive cruise control and aren’t even huge fans of cruise control. The latter you can’t really use in traffic, so about the only time we have used it is when on a road trip while on the highway in the middle of nowhere. But even then, it’s not always useful.

Adaptive cruise control supposedly allows you to use the system in heavier traffic, or so we’re told. But we tried using it on the highway in a city and it freaked us out. The radar sensors and/or the system don’t seem to detect cars fast enough, leading to some close calls we’d rather not experience.

In our experience, some people are far too trusting of any and every technology, especially if it promises they don’t have to do as much. Driving in busy traffic on the highway is boring at best and nerve racking at worst. We can see the appeal of adaptive cruise control, but flicking that on might be increasing your risk of a crash.

The study also concluded the driver assistance technology that has the greatest impact on decreasing crashes is lane keep assist, followed by driver monitoring systems. We’re not huge fans of either, but we can see why those can help with people who’d rather not be driving.

Image via Mercedes-Benz