Adaptive cruise control apparatus

An adaptive cruise control module (1) for automatically bringing a vehicle to a halt behind a target vehicle includes a look-up table (8) holding pre-computed brake demand values for given target ranges and vehicle speeds. A controller (7) applies an appropriately selected brake demand value to the vehicle's braking system (4) until the vehicle comes to rest. The look-up table (8) values are computed such that the rate of deceleration and rate of change of deceleration closely match those applied by a typical driver when manually stopping a vehicle. A further refinement allows the vehicle to creep along behind the target vehicle in a slowly-moving queue of traffic by providing the look-up table (8) with throttle demand values for given target ranges for application to a throttle control system (5, 6).