| Toyota orders global Prius, other hybrids recall over brakes |
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09/02/2010 13:20 (733 Day 00:14 minutes ago) | |||||
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The FINANCIAL -- Toyota Motor Corp is recalling its 2010 Prius and Lexus hybrids worldwide because of brake problems, the latest in a string of safety problems at the world's largest carmaker.
"We have decided to recall as we regard safety for our customers as our foremost priority," Akio Toyoda, the company's president, told a press conference in Tokyo on Tuesday, AL Jazeera reports. The recall follows complaints from Toyota owners in the US and Japan about a delay under some condition when the brakes in the Prius are pressed. Toyota officials had earlier informed Japan's transport ministry about the Prius recall, with grim-faced company bosses bowing before ranks of assembled media.
The world's largest automaker is under fire for two other recalls covering more than 8 million vehicles worldwide due to problems with slipping floormats and sticky accelerator pedals, Reuters informs. It is also facing a potential rush of litigation for crashes linked to those problems and blamed for 19 deaths and numerous injuries in the United States over the past decade.
Toyota said it was recalling a total of 437,000 units of its 2010 Prius, Sai, Prius PHV (plug-in hybrid), and Lexus HS250h hybrids globally, the same source reports. The recall covers 155,000 vehicles in North America, 223,000 in Japan, 53,000 in Europe and 5,000 elsewhere. "Toyota has been, beyond any doubts, the top player in hybrid car segment, and the fact that Prius and other hybrid models will be part of this massive recall significantly dents its image," said Suh Sung-moon, an analyst at Korea Investment & Securities in Seoul.
The Prius was Japan's top-selling car in 2009 and the world's most popular hybrid model, according to BBC. There have been complaints in Japan and the US that the brakes momentarily fail when driven on rough roads. The brake problem was thought to affect about 270,000 Prius models that were sold in the US and Japan starting last May. Toyota blames a software glitch and says it has already fixed vehicles sold this year.
The Lexus hybrid is sold in the United States and the Sai saloon is marketed only in Japan, Times wrote. It is understood that Toyota’s luxury brand has been dragged into the crisis because the Lexus HS 250 hybrid is essentially built on the same platform as the third-generation Prius and shares the same software fault. About 15,500 Lexus hybrids have been sold since the model was introduced last summer. Both it and the Prius are built in Japan.
The Prius and the Lexus hybrid became the subjects of a class-action lawsuit in Canada last week, which claims that the vehicles’ brake systems are defectively designed, according to the same source. That suit is separate from more than 30 other actions that have been initiated across North America over sudden acceleration in Toyotas that has been blamed on faulty throttle pedals. In Japan Toyota has recalled nearly 200,000 Priuses sold from April last year until yesterday, according to papers the carmaker filed with the ministry.
At least 30 class-action lawsuits have been filed against the Japanese car maker over the accelerator pedals and on Friday it faced its first US suit over complaints of faulty braking in its Prius model, AL Jazeera informs. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the US says it has opened a formal investigation into Prius-related complaints of "momentary loss of braking capability while travelling over an uneven road surface, pothole or bump".
The NHTSA has received nearly 200 such complaints since February 3, including four reports of accidents, two of them said to have resulted in injury, according to the same source. Despite its problems, Toyota's shares, which have lost about a fifth of their value since late January, were up 1.7 per cent early on Tuesday. Hiroaki Osakabe, a fund manager at Chibagin Asset Management, said Toyota shares fell while the company "appeared not to be doing anything to deal with its problems". "But now, the fact that they're taking concrete steps on the issue is being seen as positive," he said.
Before it announced the Prius recall in Japan, Toyota estimated that its losses would reach $2bn (£1.23bn) in costs and lost sales from its worldwide recall of vehicles that might have faulty accelerator pedals, BBC reports. The Prius recall is expected to send this figure even higher.
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