I drive a Nissan Ariya sometimes, which has adaptive cruise control. It's ... okay, but I'm not sure my own car's "dumb" cruise control is any worse to be honest.

My own car's cruise control is just three large buttons on the steering wheel: one which says "keep going this speed when I take my foot off the gas", one cancel button, and one "go back to the previous speed" button. It works wonders and is quite comfortable to use. Never messes up, I can rely on it 100% to do its one simple job.

The Ariya is much more fancy, but it's so much less reliable. If it's snowing outside it sometimes just randomly turns itself off because sensors got covered in snow, leading to a rapid deceleration until I intervene. Sometimes it refuses to turn on because sensors are covered in snow. And its braking curve is uncomfortable; when the car in front stops (e.g in stop and go traffic), it gets way close to the car in front and brakes hard, instead of slowly coming to a stop at a comfortable distance. Oh and it's connected to the nav system; I've had it just suddenly slow the car down to a crawl because the nav system had chosen a stupid route, it slowed down to take an exit while I stayed on the highway.

I'll take dumb but reliable any day over smart and unreliable. Even if it means I sometimes have to actually adjust speed myself.

Relatedly, I don't actually mind having to drive the car. I like cruise control because my foot gets fatigued when pressing the gas pedal for hours on end, but making manual adjustments to my speed? Changing gears? Listening to the engine to make sure it's at a happy RPM? I feel like that stuff just gives me small stuff to do so I keep paying attention to the driving.

The incessant beeping in modern cars on the other hand is just a distraction. Luckily, the Nissan lets you configure it so that 2 quick button presses on the steering wheel disables all the useless alarms. I'm so happy I don't have to do that manually for each "safety" feature every time I get in.

I hated it on my Toyota, but love it on the Honda Prologue (which is really a Chevy Blazer). On the Toyota it would drift down until I was following someone who I would normally have passed if I saw them coming. It would then race to catch up if I changed lanes. The Prologue gets closer before slowing, so I feel the approach and change lanes. It also has better behavior in traffic.

The stuff BMW ships is great. The ACC that I tried in a normal Toyota a few years ago was way worse. I'm a huge ACC fan but it really woke me up that I need to evaluate the vendors before I purchase the car.