Exploring Toyota’s Standard Safety: Your Peace of Mind Matters

For safety-conscious car drivers, Toyota has long been recognized as one of the best brands in the American market, if not the world. That’s not an idle brag either. According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), Toyota was one of the best-performing brands for vehicle safety in its new, tougher 2023 evaluation. Safety is one of the number one reasons to drive a Toyota (though, there are many others, of course).

No matter the style of your Toyota, safety is built into the brand. The IIHS gave the Prius, Prius Prime, Camry, Highlander, Sienna, and Tundra its highest Top Safety Pick+ rating for the Small Car (both Prius models), Mid Size Car, Mid Size SUV, Minivan, and Large Pickup categories, respectively. Meanwhile, in the just-slightly-below Top Safety Pick rating, the Toyota Corolla sedan and hatchback, Toyota Corolla Cross, RAV4, RAV4 Prime, and Venza earned high marks in the Small Car and Small SUV categories.

But what makes Toyota safety so remarkable? In this post, we’ll look at one of the key pillars of Toyota safety: the many features in the Toyota Safety Sense (TTS) suite. We’ll look at what’s new in TSS 3.0 as well as what comes standard with some older models.

Toyota Safety Sense: Industry-Leading Standards

Between its market launch in 2015 and July 2022, Toyota Safety Sense was installed in over 32 million vehicles around the world. And that end date was over a year ago, so it’s only become more widespread since then. Virtually every passenger car that Toyota sells in Japan, the USA, and Europe has at least some form of Toyota Safety Sense.

What Is Toyota Safety Sense?

Toyota Safety Sense is a suite of hardware and software capabilities. They combine radar sensors and cameras to identify potential hazards and other issues that can impact a driver’s ability to stay safe on the road, hazards that the driver might not yet have noticed.

If you buy a Toyota vehicle with model year 2021 or newer, it’s all but guaranteed to have some form of Toyota Safety Sense installed. Earlier model years might only have TSS on higher trim levels, so if you’re buying a used Toyota from prior to 2021, be sure to inquire about TSS installation.

The Toyota Safety Sense suite includes the following features:

Pre-Collision System (PCS)

The PCS is designed to help drivers avoid frontal collisions through audio-visual alerts and automatic braking. PCS also includes Pedestrian Detection (PD) which is designed to reduce crash speed and potential damage or injury in frontal collisions that might involve a pedestrian, bicyclist, or motorcyclist.

Lane Departure Alert (LDA)

The LDA will provide alerts when it detects unintended lane departures. Additionally, LDA offers steering assistance in certain situations. The LDA reads visible lane markers, and it provides an audio-visual alert as well as steering assistance when it detects that a driver is drifting out of their lane.

Dynamic Radar Cruise Control (DRCC)

This is an adaptive cruise control system for easy highway driving. The DRCC will detect vehicles in front of your car and automatically adjust the cruising speed so that you can maintain a predetermined following distance. That means speeding up when the car in front of you speeds up (to the speed you’ve selected) and slowing down when it slows down. Adaptive cruise control is a game-changer for longer trips, and it’s a core Toyota Safety Sense feature.

Lane Tracing Assist (LTA)

While DRCC is active, this lane-centering function uses both the lines on the road as well as preceding vehicles to ensure that your car is centered in its lane and isn’t drifting too far to either side. This feature has received significant upgrades in TSS 3.0, which we will discuss below.

Road Sign Assist

Humans can miss road signs, especially if they’re passing us by at 50 miles per hour. Road Sign Assist is designed to use the forward-facing camera in your Toyota to detect road signs and display them in the vehicle’s MID (Multi-Information Display). This provides the driver with awareness of critical road signs like posted speed limits. It can also alert you if you’re going faster than the speed limit. This is a fantastic feature that helps you avoid danger (and speeding tickets) in areas where the posted speed limit might suddenly change with only a single sign notification.

Automatic High Beams

We’ve all been there—a car driving toward you with its high beams on, blinding you with the glare on a dark road. The TSS Automatic High Beams feature will detect oncoming headlights as well as the taillights of preceding vehicles and will automatically toggle between high and low beams, giving you the best vision possible without harming other drivers.

What’s New in Toyota Safety Sense 3.0?

For the 2023 model year and beyond, Toyota introduced TSS 3.0, the most powerful version yet of Toyota Safety Sense. TSS 3.0 updates many of the above systems and introduces a completely new feature, Proactive Driving Assist (PDA).

In terms of upgrades, TSS 3.0 includes four distance settings, instead of three, with the DRCC, and improves speed adjustments so they’re smoother, more natural, and better when changing lanes. TSS 3.0 has an upgraded LTA feature to adjust your position to give more space between objects—such as if you’re passing a large truck in the next lane over. The new Emergency Driving Stop system monitors driver actions, and if the driver is inattentive and does not respond to prompts, it can bring the car to a stop.

Proactive Driving Assist (PDA)

All new to TSS 3.0, the PDA offers its own suite of features:

• It provides gentle braking assistance on curves, as well as steering to help support distance control from a preceding vehicle, pedestrian, or bicyclist.
• Its Obstacle Anticipation Assist can detect vehicles parked on the sides of the street, as well as pedestrians or bicyclists either on the side of or crossing the road.
• The Deceleration Assist feature provides braking assistance to gently reduce vehicle speed when it detects slower preceding vehicles or upcoming turns in the road.
• The Steering Assist feature detects the lines of the roadway and can vary the assistance power steering offers to help a driver stay within the lane. It does not actively steer the vehicle, so unlike other driver assistance features in other brands that might make you feel like you’re losing control, there’s no discomfort here.

As you can see, the Toyota Safety Sense suite is powerful and versatile and helps Toyota’s cars earn their highly deserving safety accolades. TSS 3.0 is available on certain 2023 models, while other models may have TSS 2.0 or 2.5. Inquire with the seller to learn the specifics.

If you want a reliable, safe car that will minimize the risk to you and other drivers or pedestrians, a Toyota is a no-brainer choice. For help assessing both new and used models, contact the experts at Beaverton Toyota to get started in your Toyota research today.

Tags: Proactive Driving Assist, Safety Standards, Toyota Safety Sense, Toyota Safety Sense 3.0
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