Imagine you are driving your car on a normal day. As you stop for a red light, you’re hit from behind because the driver behind you stopped watching the road. This isn’t an uncommon scenario unfortunately– a recent National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report found that in 2018, 400,000 people were injured in crashes involving a distracted driver. 

Now imagine that same situation, except this time the car stops on its own thanks to an automatic emergency braking system that intervenes and helps prevent the collision.  

Once just a dream technology, Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) is now recognized as an important tool to help reduce vehicle collisions. Independent research, such as the 2016 study by the Insurance Institute of Highway Safety and the 2019 studies by Impact Research and the University of Michigan, found that AEB reduces rear-end collisions by 39, 37 and 46 percent, respectively.  

At Toyota, we’re working to make AEB available to nearly everyone. That’s why we have included it in the Toyota Safety Sense (TSS) package of active safety technologies, which is available on nearly all new Toyota vehicles at no additional cost. In addition to being standard on 16 Toyota models, Lexus has added Lexus Safety System+ (LSS+) as a standard feature on all models as well.  

Since being announced in 2015, TSS has become a safety cornerstone, helping pave the way for AEB to become available on many vehicles across the industry. In fact, Toyota has sold more than 10 million Toyota and Lexus vehicles globally equipped with TSS or LSS+.  

Toyota isn’t stopping now. We continue to evolve TSS/LSS+ to help advance their capabilities and to popularize new technologies and to lead the industry toward the goal of a world without traffic fatalities. Our focus on advanced technologies is helping inform our research and development of future automated vehicle features that have the potential to help cities become spaces where mobility solutions are safe and work in harmony with humans and the surrounding environment.