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There is a serious concern to keep in mind about adaptive cruise control or automatic braking, which is, their inelegant failure modes. For a simpler example, consider that new cars have started including blind spot sensors, which light up an indicator on the side-view mirrors if a car might be in the corresponding blind spot. The thing that baffles me about these is, if that system fails, then the indicator will be off regardless of whether there's anyone in the blind spot, which is exactly the wrong thing to do.

Likewise, if adaptive cruise control fails, you'll probably rear-end someone. So then you get into the same problem, that there's a rare situation in which the failure is potentially fatal. So then you have to pay attention for something that's unlikely, which we're pretty bad at, so what value is added?