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Jan Harold Brunvand, the master of urban legends, has a fair bit to say about this legend. The legend began in the late 1970s when cruise control was first available for RVs (which then was the vehicle always featured in this legend). As he says, Sometimes it was a retired couple that made the dangerous (but never fatal) error with cruise control, otherwise it was a young and naive driver. Versions starring a wealthy student from the Middle East also began circulating at that time (one reader recalls seeing such a tale mentioned in a newspaper in 1977 or 1978), but these don't appear to have achieved widespread acceptance until 1984 or thereabouts. Wrote Brunvand: The implication here, of course, is that rich Arabs don't understand technology, and as a result they may be 'getting what they deserve' when they spend their wealth so lavishly in the United States. These days, the victim(s) will often be described as an older couple, people you'd find it likely to believe would be baffled by the technology. In earlier versions from around the time of the Great Gasoline Shortage in the U.S., you'd be told the victim was an Arab with too much money and too little sense. In versions earlier than that, the victims were unfamiliar with the technology not because they were new to this country or plain mechanical klutzs, but rather because the technology itself was new. Brunvand also points out: A persistent feature in car legends of this kind is the denigration of a minority person (senior citizen, foreigner, woman, etc.) who allegedly misunderstands the nature of some new but fairly uncomplicated technological device. In the spring of 2002, a telling of the venerable Cruise Control legend became part of a widely circulated outrageous lawsuits list known on the Internet as the Stella Awards: In September 2009, the Grazinski entry reappeared, this time changing the hapless driver into a woman: The Grazinski entry had been added to a compilation of other false entries — it was just another howler tacked on.
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