2018 Tacoma winch bumper and grill guard install with front radar

My shop is installing a FabFours Premium front bumper with the full guard and winch on a 2018 Tacoma. Of course the grill guard goes right across the Toyota emblem that houses the front radar. I know people have asked about this quite a bit and there's not a lot of good info out there so I thought I'd share what we find out.

I believe certain models have this radar in the lower grille, but on this model it was obvious when looking at the back of the grille that it is behind the emblem.
For starters, I wanted to make sure the truck didn't just think something was there and apply the brakes randomly at speed. To test this I zip tied a some plastic and cardboard in front of the emblem and took off down the highway.

The good news is that nothing major happened. Also worth pointing out, the truck obviously uses the radar by the rear view mirror as well. I know this because when I took off down the highway, I activated the cruise control, and it said "radar ready". When I set the cruise, it didn't let me adjust the cruise distance (showed all 3 bars blank), but it did keep me a certain distance from vehicles in front of me and would accelerate when I would pull into the other lane. When I pulled back in the lane behind a vehicle, it did apply the brakes and decelerated until I was a certain distance away from them.
Then after about 3 miles of driving it came across the screen "radar not available". I guess after a certain amount of time if decides something is wrong and it's not a fluke that one of the sensors is picking up something right in front of it. At that time cruise stopped working. Every time I would try to turn cruise on it would come up that error "radar not available". Quick workaround is to hold the cruise button for 2 seconds, which bypasses the radar, and cruise would activate with no errors or warnings. This has to be done every time cruise is activated, but it is quick. There was also a small yellow dash light that shows what looks like 2 cars colliding and says "off" under it. I'm sure this is letting me know that the crash detection radar is inactive. It's not a big or real bright light, may get annoying at night though. Too bad there isn't a workaround that involves disabling just the one grille sensor, since the windshield radar seemed to be doing the job fine, but if there is one I don't know about it.

So far so good. Holding the cruise down 2 seconds to activate it and having a small dash light on isn't a big deal to this customer. They just don't want errors that will cripple the vehicle or have errors constantly coming up on their display when they start the truck. Also don't want to give up cruise control entirely.
I haven't gotten to test it yet, but I don't believe the auto dim feature for bright lights will work either.
We installed a King Suspension and wheels/tires a few weeks ago.
We are also installing 650 lb springs on the front (instead of the original King 600 lb springs) and a K&N Intake while we have it in for the bumper/winch.
I'll update pics and results with the bumper in a few days once everything is finished.

 

Nice!! I’m sure you know you might be able to install a pro grille with the lower radar sensor and have everything work with that bumper.. good luck and let us know how it worked out

 

Just upgraded him to the FabFours Premium bumper with full grill guard. It came with LED fogs and turn signals pre installed into the bumper. This thing was heavy! We previously had installed the King front and rear with adjusters with standard 600lb spring, Toytec AAL in rear, Total Chaos UCA's set at 13 threads driver and 11 passenger and was at 24" hub to fender front and 25" rear.
When the bumper was ordered we also ordered new 650lb springs. We installed them and lowered preload to 7 threads driver and 5 passenger. With the bumper installed we ended up at 23" front hub to fender and still 25" rear. He is going to add a Leer topper and some gear in the rear so we will see how it sits after that before making final adjustments.

One thing to note, with the 24" hub to fender setup and our 17x9 +1 offset with 285/70r17 Ridge Grapplers it barely cleared the body mount on both sides. At 23" now it rubs the passenger side body mount when in reverse and turning right. Drivers side does not rub. Not sure that it's enough to warrant a body mount chop, but I'm going to let the customer drive it a bit and see if it's annoying.

This truck has the cruise and pedestrian radar in the Toyota grill emblem. There is a little yellow light on the dash that stays illuminated letting you know that the radar isn't active. It's not as bright or annoying as a TPMS light, I barely noticed it. Nothing comes across the display after driving it for 30 miles or so, but if you activate cruise it will let you know that the radar isn't active and needs to be cleaned. Cruise won't activate that way. You can hold the cruise button down for 2 seconds and that activates standard cruise control without the radar and that avoids having any errors pop up and cruise works fine, just without radar.

 

Dunno if it's useful, but I have this grill, and I replaced my offroad grill with an OEM pro grill with the radar insert piece. It works well, and I only have an occasional BRAKE flare around once a month (which I believe is actually part of the recall).

I do want to see what a winch install ooks like on it, and i really want to replace the driving lights with some nice quad leds, but aside from that i love it. Its also pretty effing heavy.

 

I can get you some shots of the winch if you’d like.

 

that would be awesome!

 

If there’s something different you want to see let me know. Bolts to the bottom on this one so usually that eliminates having to rotate the winch body. Pretty straightforward.

 

the biggest issues arise when metal is blocking the radar. i had a customer buy one of my grilles and he installed it, put his grille guard back up and it completely blocked it and had immediate issues. had to make him a custom grille with the radar at the top. it was kinda ugly, but works perfectly now.

good luck man!

 

Update:
After putting 650 lbs springs on, FabFours Premium front bumper, and lowering preload to 5 threads passenger and 7 driver, we ended up with an inch less lift in the front. It sits and rides about how the customer wants it now, but it did rub the plastic and the body mount pretty good. We did a body mount chop on both sides and all good now. I'll have to say, our guy did a nice clean job on it. Looks smoother than it did factory.