How do Automatic High Beams work?
As you know, there are two things we do every week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. On Tuesdays we do the Used Car Spotlight, which is an in-depth look into one of the pre-owned vehicles available at Go Toyota on the Trail. On Thursdays, we take an equally-in-depth look at one of the great special features found in many vehicles on the market today, but it doesn’t have a fancy name – until now. We’ve finally settled on simply calling the weekly post How’s This Work? And for this week, we’re looking at automatic high beams.
[ LAST WEEK: How does Adaptive Cruise Control work? ]
What is AHB?
When we took a look at the full Toyota Safety Sense package last month, there were quite a few technologies on the list that we hadn’t yet covered. Automatic High Beams was one of those technologies, so we thought we’d tackle that this week as a bit of a break from the driver-assistive safety features we’ve been looking at the past several weeks. Technically it is one of those features, but AHB is more dedicated towards cutting out an extra distraction than straight up avoiding a crash.
Automatic High Beams utilizes the same sensors and cameras that those other features do, and if your vehicle meets the following five requirements then the AHB system kicks in and automatically switches your headlights to the high beams.
- It’s dark out
- You’re traveling over 30 km/h
- There are no oncoming headlights
- There are no taillights in front of you
- There is no strong lighting around the vehicle (i.e. street lights)
If those requirements are met, then AHB will kick on and automatically illuminate your high beams, thus increasing visibility but also cutting out your step of having to turn them on yourself. Then if any single one of those requirements is no longer met, the system will automatically dim the high beams to low beams. Once they’re met again, voila – back to high beams, and so forth. This eliminates your need to constantly turn your high beams on and off when traveling down dark roads at night, thus getting rid of an entire extra distraction that you don’t need.
If you have any questions about how Automatic High Beams work or perhaps would like to know which Toyota vehicles come equipped with AHB, don’t hesitate to give us a call. This is a great feature that not only enhances your safety, but eliminates an annoying distraction from nighttime driving! Watch one or both of the videos below for a more visual representation of how AHB works.