Usually, if you want a car that’s equipped with the latest advanced safety features, you’d find yourself opting to buy a brand-new model. Toyota, however, seems to have found a way for you to have the latest safety features around, without needing the big investment required to upgrade to a brand-new car.

The Japanese automaker has rolled out a program that allows customers who purchased pre-owned vehicles to have them retrofitted with the latest driver assistance systems and anti-theft devices. This initiative is being offered across the brand’s dealer network in Japan as part of its revenue diversification and to drive higher sales volumes for pre-owned cars.

By offering this upgrade at the point of sale, Toyota wants to gain an edge over other second-hand car dealers by making its pre-owned car inventory safer than it was when it first came out of the showroom, and at the same time offer a stronger value proposition.

The safety and driver assistance upgrades vary depending on the host vehicle’s electric architecture, but this would basically make features like forward collision warning, rear cross traffic alert, blind spot warning, and adaptive cruise control available for installation to older Toyota models.

The installation, calibration, and future maintenance of the systems are exclusively done on Toyota’s official service networks, which also generates an additional revenue stream for dealerships.

For now, Toyota has yet to announce if the ADAS retrofit program would be offered outside Japan. But considering the price of brand new vehicles nowadays, this could be something that Toyota Motor Philippines can look at and offer as well.

Source: Nikkei Asia