This means that cruise control goes from being something that relieves stress on you to something that causes additional stress.
To make matters worse, every single car salesman I've encountered has the feeling that doing everything to the extreme is the best way to sell cars. Which means that is is totally, completely believable that the OP with his Golf had the salesman set it to a minimum follow distance and then not explain that they did this or how to change it!
Although now that I think about it, I was using the Subaru ACC, so the dash has a visible indicator if it's tracking a car and maintaining speed relative to that. Perhaps yours doesn't have that?
Both have a very simple there/not their car silhouette to let you know if it detects the car in front of you. Just below that they also have some sort of colored to tell you how close the car is (good, clothes, to close). Last is a silhouette of your car. All three in a simple stack.
It’s an excellent design, perfectly glanceable. I did rent a car once that showed you how many feet away the car in front of you was. It was kind of interesting but I found it completely useless.
Realistically when the car in front of you starts getting close enough that the indicator changes, the car is already slowly slowing down. If it turns red, your car is slowing down faster.
You really don’t need any of the numbers, and they would likely take longer for a person to process than the simple visual imagery does.
I haven’t had an issue of not understanding what the car is/is going to do. The only real prop I’ve experienced is some cars are willing to accelerate/decelerate much faster than I want them to, largely for comfort reasons.
