I'd settle for a cruise control that adjusts to the steering and hills a little more like a live driver, which ought to be a much simpler engineering problem. That is, it reduces speed based on how sharp you're turning, and it slows a little going uphill and speeds up a little going downhill. Hitting a decent curve (not a sharp one, just the kind you encounter on interstates) with cruise control on can be more than a little scary, because you don't realize how much you automatically slow down for curves, so it feels like it's accelerating. All these adjustments would reduce the number of times I have to turn off cruise control temporarily in moderate traffic -- any time you go uphill, it's easy to tell who's using cruise control.
The curves don't bother me, because I'm still seeing them coming and compensating if needed (though yeah, it's a little different, disengaging the cruise control with a light tap on the brake pedal or thumbing a switch where normally I'd just lift my foot off the gas pedal a bit). The places I tend to use cruise control don't have enough curves sharp enough to bother disabling cruise control for me to get tired of having to turn it back on again after each curve. If I were dealing with such curves more often (or driving the stretch of Beltway near the Mormon Temple at hours when traffic were light enough to use the cruise control) I'd probably feel differently (so it's still an interesting problem to solve).
On moderate hills I like the fact that the cruise control keeps my speed steady. It's only on larger/steeper ones that I start wishing it'd start playing with gravity instead of against it, but at that point I'm usually in WV on hills so steep that the cruise control gives up and switches itself off going uphill. (OTOH, if it allowed gravity to speed it up on the downslopes, it might make it a bit farther along the upslopes.) Of course, it also depends on the reason I've turned on cruise control. Sometimes it's because I've got a hunch a speed trap is coming, and specifically don't want it to speed up on the downslopes.
It'd be interesting to have a cruise control that a) wasn't just a really basic feedback loop with a whole bunch of "turn yourself off" conditions, and b) exposed enough of its programming that I could tinker with the algorithms. I could burn a lot of time (and gasoline) playing with that.
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On moderate hills I like the fact that the cruise control keeps my speed steady. It's only on larger/steeper ones that I start wishing it'd start playing with gravity instead of against it, but at that point I'm usually in WV on hills so steep that the cruise control gives up and switches itself off going uphill. (OTOH, if it allowed gravity to speed it up on the downslopes, it might make it a bit farther along the upslopes.) Of course, it also depends on the reason I've turned on cruise control. Sometimes it's because I've got a hunch a speed trap is coming, and specifically don't want it to speed up on the downslopes.
It'd be interesting to have a cruise control that a) wasn't just a really basic feedback loop with a whole bunch of "turn yourself off" conditions, and b) exposed enough of its programming that I could tinker with the algorithms. I could burn a lot of time (and gasoline) playing with that.