How cruise control works

I learned about cruise control after driving over two hundred miles in my dads car (2011 Honda CRV) on a thruway for about four hours with no cruise control. This was my longest drive ever. I live in the city, so I primarily get around by public transit. In the beginning of the trip, I was having trouble maintaining my speed on the highway and my girlfriend suggested that I use cruise control. My first reaction was: what's cruise control? Unfortunately, even though she knew what it was she wasn't sure how to enable it in my car and we agreed that trying to figure out a feature that can influence the speed of the car while going 60 mph is probably not a good idea.

The first thing I did after the end of that trip was to look up how it worked and now I'm a believer.

Here's how it works in my dads car:

There's three buttons:

• Cruise control main
• Accelerate / Resume
• Decelerate / Set

Press the cruise control main button. This turns on the cruise control feature but doesn't actually maintain the speed of your car yet. In order for that to happen, you need to press the Decelerate / Set button once you've reached your desired speed. Once you've accelerated or decelerated to your desired speed, pressing SET will tell the car to cruise!

Now that you're cruising, you may want to do one of five things:

1. Accelerate but do not cruise at a higher speed. Just hit the pedal - you'll go faster but once you take your foot off the pedal it'll just return to the current cruising speed.
2. Decelerate but do not cruise at a lower speed. Hit the brakes. This will unset cruising. If you do not accelerate, your speed will keep falling. If you want to resume your cruise control, just hit the resume button and you'll return to cruising. 
3. Cruise at a higher speed. Hit the accelerate button until you reach your desired speed or you can accelerate and hit the SET again.
4. Cruise at a lower speed. Hit the decelerate button until you reach your desired speed or you can brake and hit SET again.
5. Turn off cruise control completely. Just press the cruise control main button and you should see the cruise control light indicator go off. 

Drive safe!