Gadgetory

if you've ever been the driver on a long road trip you've probably wished at some point that you could just kick back and let the car drive itself unfortunately autonomous vehicles are still a ways away from becoming mass-market items and so the closest thing we have right now is cruise control which is convenient but won't exactly drive the car for you as a few people in those urban legends who thought they could set the cruise control in the RV and then go in the back and make a sandwich found out but even so cruise control is becoming a much more useful tool with the advent of adaptive cruise control which has found its way into many modern vehicles unlike old school cruise control which allowed your car to maintain one constant speed newer adaptive cruise control systems have the ability to adjust your car speed on-the-fly and therefore increase safety but how does that work adaptive cruise control is often implemented on cars using radar although some use lasers radar is more common since it works better in adverse weather conditions usually the radar is mounted on the front of the car near the bumper or behind the grille so when you turn the cruise control on your car will fire a radar beam which travels until it hits another vehicle in front of you the return signal is processed by a computer to determine how far behind the second car you are the cruise control uses this information to keep your car a set number of seconds behind by dynamically changing your speed this gives you the advantage of not having to brake and readjust your cruise control if you get stuck behind a car that's moving slowly or frequently alters its speed and also helps mitigate the effect of normal cruise control lowing you into a false sense of security potentially slowing your reaction time in the event that there is a sudden change in speed required now many adaptive cruise control systems also feature collision avoidance where the car can automatically brake more aggressively if it senses that you're getting way too close to another vehicle or object you'll also often get an audio or a visual warning that you're about to hit something much like professional pilots have in their planes to let them know they're getting too close to other air traffic our play for example a volcano some adaptive cruise control systems can even work with other technologies to give you even more features for example a system that's designed to work with GPS could automatically slow down if you're in a construction zone that the GPS knows about or help to control your speed more effectively on Hills since the system will know what the terrain ahead looks like improving not only safety but gas mileage as well and of course when we do start buying autonomous cars on mass adaptive cruise control like systems will be very important for actually keeping the car where you want it on the road so you don't end up in the back of a semi-truck like those cops in the Blues Brothers for now though it's not surprising that adaptive cruise control like many optional features they try to sell you down at the old car dealership don't come cheap as it's usually an add-on that will set you back a couple thousand dollars but it might just be worth it for you if you're an inattentive driver with some money to burn or maybe you'll even get one of those super slick salesman who will sweeten the deal with some of the those free floor mats and under coatings that I've heard so much about speaking of things I've heard about fresh books in the spirit of the format here a tech quickie I'm going to tell you all the great things about fresh books as quickly as I can fresh books is for small business owners who want to save time and get organized and basically spend the time that they have either with their families or doing the actual work they want to do rather than fussing about with complicated accounting software it lets you send out invoices it lets you track your expenses it lets you murder Brandon unfortunately it doesn't let us murder Brandon that's why he's still alive it lets you take deposits and it lets you see if your client has actually received your invoice and then even allows them to pay through fresh books it's all cloud tracked you can like take pictures of receipts it's freaking cool and you can try it for nothing for 30 days by going over to fresh books calm forward slash tech quickie linked in the video description and entering tech quickie and the how did you hear about us section so thanks for watching guys if you like this video like it if you disliked it like it if you want to check out our other channels we've got some great videos over on channel super fun right now you can leave a comment with suggestions for future videos then you can subscribe and follow so you don't miss any fast as possible episodes just like this one