In this paper, an observer-based adaptive controller is proposed to control the longitudinal motion of vehicles. The standard gradient method is used to estimate the vehicle parameters, mass, time constant, etc. The inter-vehicle spacing and its derivatives are estimated by using the sliding mode cascade observer introduced in this paper. It is shown that the proposed adaptive controller is uniformly ultimately bounded. It is also shown that the errors of the relative distance, the relative velocity and the relative acceleration asymptotically converge to zero. The simulation results are presented to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed method.