What good is safety technology if you can't afford it? Ford for 2010 is bringing radar-based adaptive cruise control (ACC) with Collision Warning and Brake Support to market at a tantalizingly low price: $1,195. It's on the 2010 Ford Taurus, Lincoln MKT crossover (Ford Flex cousin), and Lincoln MKS sedan. On most cars, radar-based ACC, also called active cruise control, costs about $2,000 and can be as much as $2,895. Ford chose a next-generation Delphi ACC system radar that uses radar rather than lower-cost laser, which critics say isn't as effective in marginal weather. Ford warns of an impending collision by bouncing the light from 14 red LEDs off the base of the windshield (photo); it is effective and hard to ignore.

Ford says its ACC system works (tracks vehicles) to distances of 600 feet, or two football fields, or seven seconds at 60 mph, and allows you to maintain following distances of 1.5 seconds (132 feet) to 2.5 seconds (220 feet) at highway speeds. Some radar ACC works at speeds down to 20 mph before warning lights and tones sound telling the car; the Ford-Delphi unit cuts out at 35 mph. The cutout speed doesn't matter on most highways most of the time. It will make a difference if you're in heavy traffic, where expressway and interstate-highway traffic can easily drop below 35 mph; only in rush-hour traffic or when approaching an accident would you repeatedly drop below 20 mph. The best active cruise control is stop-and-go ACC, which uses a second, close-range radar that is effective at closer distances typical of slow-moving traffic. But a two-radar solution obviously will be more costly.

One possibility, still being researched, is to use the video camera at the top of the windshield that's used for lane departure warning, in place of the second radar unit. That would keep costs down for stop and go ACC.

For Ford, the challenge is the same as it is for Hyundai with its $1,250 in-dash navigation in the Hyundai Sonata: When you get this close to a $1,000 price - which of course in the marketing world would be $999 (or $999!) - you need to work relentlessly to get to that magic price point. A technology that's $2,000 on many cars and $999 on yours will find a lot of buyers.