My wife and I just returned from visiting our middle son in Santa Fe. I like to use National for rental cars on this and other trips. Aside from still getting a good rate through my old engineering job’s account number, I also like the “pick a car in the aisle and go” promotion. The last time we were in Santa Fe two years ago, I picked a brand new Toyota Corolla because I figured I didn’t need the ground clearance or traction of an SUV and I wanted to take a look at the safety features that come standard on a Japanese sedan. Finally, Maire Anne and I Are since we’re now in our geritol years, my visual acuity isn’t as good as I used to be able to drive any great distances at any time of the day or night, and a few dings and chimes (or a good nudge in the ribs) to keep me from doing something stupid might not be a bad thing.

As I wrote here, I absolutely hated the Corolla. The combination of the lane departure warning system, which made me feel like I was ripping the steering wheel out of my hands, and the auto-dimming headlights, which kept turning off the high beams on nearly empty roads and instead switching on low beams whose lighting profiles were downright unsafe, made me want to scream.

To be clear, while I love vintage cars and did the “old man yelling at clouds” thing with the Corolla, I’m not a car Luddite who thinks anything built after the Department of Transportation instituted 5 mph bumper standards in 1974 and the EPA tightened emissions standards in 1975 is garbage. There’s no question that newer cars are better than older ones on objective measures like safety, performance, economy, and emissions, and if you want to get somewhere where you don’t want to look like you’ve been put in a Waring blender or smell of such a high concentration of unburned hydrocarbons that you could spontaneously combust, you should get the newer car, not the 50-year-old one.

But my daily driver from 2003 BMW 5 Series is now over 20 years old. My wife drives a 2013 Honda Fit, so that’s a bit newer. But neither of them have Bluetooth, let alone active safety features. When I rent a car while traveling, I experience the influx of these types of features most often. Since my last reaction to these features was negative, I was curious to try it again and see if it was just the implementation on this particular make and model.

Unfortunately, the selection in National’s Emerald Aisle at the Albuquerque International Sunport was pretty slim this time: It consisted of a huge pickup truck, two small Korean crossover SUVs, and a Chevy Malibu. However, as I passed the pickup truck, I saw an Audi A4 sedan crouched next to it and thought “hit,” but there was already someone in it. I asked the guy at the booth if there were any more Audis coming. He said one should be coming in about ten minutes. And sure enough, Audi #2 soon showed up. It wasn’t a sedan, though—it was a small Q3 Quattro crossover SUV. But hey, close enough. My wife and I threw our bags in the back and headed north on I-25 toward Santa Fe.

My first impression was that there was something wrong with the car, as you had to press your foot down several inches on the accelerator before anything would happen. Later that day, I looked online and found that many people were complaining about this lag, attributing it to the turbo on the small 2-liter four-cylinder engine, the accelerated-by-wire system, the S-Trontic transmission, driving in Comfort mode rather than Sport mode, or a combination of all four. But once I got used to pushing the car to get it moving, I quickly warmed to the car. Small crossover SUVs aren’t really my thing – they all look the same, and if you don’t want the size and towing capacity of a truck, I’d rather take a station wagon – but this one was what you’d expect from a German SUV, with the emphasis on handling and ride. And the engine moved the car easily once the revs were high.

Technically, the Q3 did the same thing as the abominable Corolla with its automatic lane-keeping system. It gives you the unnatural feeling of having another hand on the wheel if you don’t comply with its overly fussy lane guidance, though perhaps a little more subtly. I quickly figured out how to turn it off. And for the most part, I couldn’t connect the frequent beeping to anything obvious. Was I approaching an intersection? Train tracks? The restaurant that serves the best huevos rancheros? A vehicle infected with mice and hantaviruses? I was never sure.

But what really surprised me, what I had never experienced and what I now want from my next car, was not the lane departure warning system, the blind spot warning system, the automatic braking assistant or any of those other safety features that I was reluctant to allow into my room due to my automotive sensibilities.

It was an adaptive cruise control.

Those of you who own vehicles with cruise control, which has been standard on many cars since the late 1980s, probably play the same game with it that I do. You set it and then use the controls instead of the pedals, dialing the speed down when traffic slows your pace and dialing it back up when it clears. You lose the game when you have to hit the brake or accelerator. Hey, it helps me stay alert on long drives, and it’s more reliable than trying to maintain speed manually. But there’s no getting around the fact that if you have a big-league-style moment and go too far, you’ll barrel right into the back of the car in front of you.

Adaptive cruise control eliminates this risk by integrating a sonar sensor into the nose of the car, slowing it down as you approach traffic. The system in the Audi worked so well that I didn’t even notice it at first. It just kept driving with cruise control on, but at a lower speed. When a gap appeared in the left lane, I pulled into it and the car accelerated back up to the previously set threshold. A number of parameters are adjustable, but I didn’t change any of them. It worked so smoothly that I immediately committed it to memory as a requirement for any “real car” we buy next. And yes, I’m probably the last person to know about it. Sort of like learning that How I met your mother, is actually quite funny despite its stupid name, at least when Neil Patrick Harris is involved.

Another thing I liked about the Q3 is that it’s the first car I’ve driven that has a central display that doesn’t look like someone took the screen off a laptop running Microsoft Windows XP (“Oooooh! 3D icons!”) and bolted it onto the dashboard. The way the look and feel of most dashboard screens have absolutely nothing to do with the look and feel of the rest of the dashboard drives me nuts. In the Q3, the instrument cluster is electronic (no mechanical speedometer and tachometers), so it and the central display have the same look and feel. I’m sure this isn’t the first car to do this, but it’s the first one I’ve driven.

So. I can still live without the mysterious beeping. And Bluetooth still drives me crazy (stop turning down the volume on the music to tell me to stay on the right!). And the chances of me running out and buying a Q3 are zero. But if there was a hundred dollar adaptive cruise control retrofit for my BMW E39 and my wife’s Honda Fit, I’d be there in a heartbeat.

But get your damn servo-controlled hands off my steering wheel.