Comment Re:The Woz actually came on /. to talk about this (Score 1) 307
You're misunderstanding. (And I didn't really try to explain it thoroughly, so here you go:)
There are several displays. The speedometer always shows the actual speed. There is another display to the right of the speedometer that shows various settings relating to the radar cruise control - the set following distance, whether the system detects a car in front of you, the set speed, and (if the Lane Keep Assist feature is turned on) whether the car has detected the lane edges or not.
When turning on the cruise control, the set speed shown on the right display is equal to the current speed. When you use the Accel or Coast buttons, it adjusts the set speed shown on the right display, independently of whatever speed you are actually going. Because of this, you can adjust your set speed even when the system is going slower than the set speed due to traffic in front of you. Also because of this, you can adjust your set speed much faster than the car is capable of reacting to match.
There is something to be said for consistency - for example, the Prius fakes "engine drag" when you let up on the accelerator, by drawing power off of the electric generator and charging the battery. It is also programmed to have creep like an automatic car does, where it starts crawling forward when you let off the brake pedal. Both of these are done to make it feel like any other car; there's no inherent reason that it needs to do these. Woz's difficulties with the cruise control stem from the fact that they depart from the standard cruise control behavior. On the other hand, if they didn't, performing some actions (like adjusting your set speed) would be much more difficult, so I don't really fault them for it. Honestly, if you're paying $30k+ for a car with all the bells and whistles, you really ought to RTFM. It may be *mostly* like every other car you've ever driven, but it will also answer a lot of questions you'll probably have, and even a few you didn't know you had.