The objective of this paper is to design the controller for longitudinal vehicle following which makes the vehicle follow the lead vehicle and keeps a safety distance without human driver operation. This paper presents a sliding mode control algorithm for the ACC system. The controller is based on three sliding surfaces. Each surface plays an individual control-deviation control, throttle control and brake control. In addition to sliding mode control, we propose some additional schemes to enhance controller performance. The first one is a gear shift-down controller which makes tractive force increase with a change of gear ratio. The other is a predictive correction method which reduces slinky effect.