Cruise Control - Unexpected Braking

We purchased a new Eclipse Cross PHEV earlier this year. The car is ‘identical’ to the recently superseded Outlander PHEV model except for the smaller body shape. We have just completed a 20,000km trip around Australia towing our camper trailer that weighs around 850-900kg when loaded.

Cruise control was constantly used throughout the trip. Away from the east coast, nearly all highways and significant roads are two lane (ie one lane in each direction). Many of these roads have periodic overtaking lanes where an extra lane is added to one side of the road to facilitate overtaking. At the end of these overtaking lanes, traffic in the left hand lane has to merge right (Australia is right hand drive). I found that, when merging right with cruise control engaged, the car would often brake without displaying any warnings if there was a vehicle approaching from the opposite direction on the other side of the road. Typically, I had around 95kph (indicated) selected on the cruise control. The braking could rapidly wipe 20kph off the speed of the vehicle before recovering to the selected cruising speed. Fortunately, the unexpected braking did not result in any incident with a vehicle behind me.

Has anyone else experienced this behaviour?

Do you have driving lights installed by any chance?

My auto cruise control has been playing up since I fitted some. I don't know if the fact they are interfering with the front sensors or front parking camera (which they do) is somehow affecting the cruise, or if it's just a coincidence that the problem started when I got the lights.

I expected the cruise functionality to be entirely based on the sensors above the windscreen, but I'm not really sure.

It might be interesting to know if your issue started when fitting driving lights

DrSnapid said:

Do you have driving lights installed by any chance?

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It’s a long time since you posted and a long time since I logged in! No, I have not installed driving lights.

In another thread I reported intermittent performance of the cruise control system - the vehicle speed bleeding off by more than 10kph when the vehicle goes through a dip between a modest down hill incline to a modest up hill incline. i reported this problem to the dealer for a second time this December and they have ordered a replacement ‘cruise control module’. I’ll be interest to see if the issue reported in this thread is solved by installing a new control module.

We had a software update 2 years ago in Europe because of such issues.

nrayanov said:

We had a software update 2 years ago in Europe because of such issues.

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is there any way to check that this recall update was actually performed? our car does often quite aggressively brake when using ACC or just with the emergency braking function (especially when going past traffic island/bollards). I remember the dealership saying they would do it at the same time as the last service, however when i checked the log book - there was nothing noted down under the software update/recall section. - I am assuming there is a certain software version that had it?

Perhaps there is a certain software version, but I do not know the exact version.

My current PHEV doesn't have the issue either, so I guess a similar or a same update has been performed in Canada.