Toyota has announced to launch two new safety packages which will be made available for most of its passenger cars in Japan by 2015, and for North America and Europe by the end of 2017. The safety technology known as “Toyota Safety Sense”, will be provided at a price range low enough to encourage its widespread use.

Toyota Safety Sense C, the package for compact cars contains three systems: pre-collision, lane departure alerts and automatic high beams. The pre-collision system makes use of a front mounted camera and laser radar to sense a collision and urge the driver to apply brakes. In case the brakes are not manually applied, the automatic brake system gets activated when the car is moving at speeds between 6-50 mph and slows it down by 18 mph to prevent the collision.

The Package for mid-size and high end cars, Toyota Safety Sense P offers an upgraded P collision setup for detecting pedestrians and autonomous cruise control, in addition to the systems available in the C package. The autonomous cruise control maintains the speed of the car according to the vehicle in front of it, with the help of  a millimeter-wave radar and camera which detect cars and pedestrians in front of it. For pedestrian detection, the advanced system works between 6-50mph, while for vehicle collision detection, it activates at 5mph to the maximum speed of the car.

A car-to-infrastructure communication technology which fits into the tires, will also be made available on optional basis for the Toyota Safety Sense P package. The vehicle will receive alerts for oncoming vehicles and pedestrians even when approaching blind intersections. It will use an IPS frequency of 760MHz for communication with the surrounding infrastructure.

Cruising at higher speeds will also be made safer with the help of a radar based cruise control enabling the lead car to communicate with the following cars.

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