A driving load estimation method for intelligent cruise control(ICC) vehicles has been proposed in this paper. Vehicle driving load is one of the most important factors of perturbations in vehicle control and can affect the control performance critically. The effect of the control with driving load estimation on vehicle-to-vehicle distance control has been presented and investigated via computer simulations and vehicle tests. The results show that vehicle-driving-load-adaptive control can provide an ICC system with a good acceleration tracking performance. In addition, the results show that driving load estimation can compensate not only the variation of driving load but also the modeling errors.