Toyota announces recall of 400,000 vehicles worldwide
Posted by admin on Feb 9, 2010
By Myra P. Saefong, MarketWatch
TOKYO (MarketWatch) — Toyota Motor Corp. announced another recall Tuesday, involving about 400,000 vehicles worldwide — most of them Prius hybrids — due to potential safety issues related to their braking systems.
The voluntary recall in the United States includes about 133,000 Prius vehicles from the 2010 model year and 14,500 Lexus 2010 HS250h vehicles to update software in the vehicles’ anti-lock brake system, Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A. Inc. said in a press release Tuesday afternoon.
Only Prius vehicles produced since May 2009 and all HS 250h vehicles are subject to the U.S. recall. The Lexus model has a similar ABS system to the 2010 Prius, but first- and second-generation Prius vehicles use a different ABS system.
News Hub: Another Setback for Toyota?
Toyota resume production in the U.S. just as brake problems mount for the Prius. MarketWatch reporter Shawn Langlois tells Stacey Delo whether there will be a recall.
The world’s largest car maker by sales volume said it will also conduct a voluntary safety recall on about 7,300 early-production, 2010 model-year Camry vehicles in the United States.
These Camrys, which are equipped with the 4-cylinder engine, will be recalled to inspect for a power steering hose that may be in contact with a front brake tube. Contact could lead to a hole in the brake tube and cause a brake fluid leak and require greater stopping distance, Toyota said.
In Japan, Toyota /quotes/comstock/13*!tm/quotes/nls/tm (TM 74.35, +1.50, +2.06%) /quotes/comstock/!7203 (JP:7203 3,375, +95.00, +2.90%) said it submitted recall notifications earlier Tuesday to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism in regard to the current-model Prius, Prius Plug-in Hybrid, the HS250h and the Sai, which is only sold in Japan.
The domestic recall affects about 223,000 vehicles and Toyota said it will begin corrective reprogramming of the software program that controls the anti-lock braking system on Feb. 10. The reprogramming is expected to take about 40 minutes per vehicle.
”We will do everything in our power to regain confidence of our customers,” Akio Toyoda, Toyota’s president, said in English at a televised news conference in Tokyo.
Total tally
All told, the recall pertains to around 400,000 vehicles worldwide, the car maker said.
In announcing its recall notification to Japan’s Transport Ministry, Toyota said in addition to the Prius, it is “now preparing remedies” for the Prius Plug-in Hybrid, the Sai and the HS250h and will suspend domestic sales of the three models or suspend deliveries to customers in the case of completed purchases.
Ahead of the official announcement, shares of Toyota closed up 2.9%, while the Nikkei 225 Stock Average slipped 0.2%.
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“As the market has been fed small hints of news releases and has been given updates, the stock has firmed,” said Brett McGonegal, a managing director at Cantor Fitzgerald. “The market is normally a quite efficient pricing mechanism that tends to overshoot on lack of information.
Toyota’s stock has been climbing “as people know news is coming out,” he said, and “my feeling is people will look at this as a buying opportunity as the market may have slightly over reacted.”
However, “if the recall grows or becomes substantially more expensive, then this trade will prove costly,” McGonegal said.
Time for apologies
Toyoda, Toyota’s president, had apologized on Friday for the company’s earlier worldwide recalls of more than 8 million cars to fix problems with its accelerator pedals and floor mats. Read the MarketWatch account of the Toyota executive’s action plan.
Tags: 000 vehicles worldwide, auto news, car news, cars, Toyota, Toyota announces recall of 400
Toyota Discloses Recall Details
Posted by admin on Feb 5, 2010
In a statement, the world’s No.1 auto maker by sales volume said the repair requires 30 minutes of work.
It also said it has begun mailing letters to the owners of recalled vehicles.
“Nothing is more important to us than the safety and reliability of the vehicles our customers drive, and we are determined to live up to the high standards people have come to expect from Toyota over the past 50 years,” said Jim Lentz, president and chief operating officer of Toyota Motor Sales.
The statements follows word that the company is in talks with Japan’s Transport Ministry on how to tackle separate problems in brakes in its Prius hybrid gasoline-electric cars, according to a person familiar with the situation.
The person said that while a recall is one among a range of options being discussed, talks are continuing as Japan’s biggest auto maker by sales seeks to damp growing consumer unease about the reliability of its vehicles amid a separate but continuing recall of over eight million autos globally that could cost it as much as $2 billion.
Earlier Friday Toyota said it’s still investigating reports from some customers over brake problems in its Prius hybrid gasoline-electric model and hasn’t taken any decisions regarding a recall. A spokesman in Tokyo said that Toyota is still “considering what measures should be taken” as it examines reports of complaints one by one.
The comments came after a report in the Nikkei said Japan’s largest auto maker by sales plans to recall about 270,000 Prius vehicles in the U.S. and Japan to fix brake problems. According to auto industry figures, the Prius was Japan’s best-selling vehicle in January for the eighth straight month.
The U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration said Feb. 4 it has opened a “preliminary evaluation” of the 2010 Prius after receiving 124 complaints from owners about braking problems, including four accidents. NHTSA hasn’t received confirmation of any recall, according to a Department of Transportation official.
Japanese transport ministry officials declined to comment.
While the company’s has issued recalls to fix problems relating to gas pedals and floor mats in the U.S., Europe, China and many other markets, those recalls so far haven’t involved vehicles sold in Japan.
“We have no information on any decision to recall the Prius,” said John Hanson, a Toyota spokesman at the company’s U.S. sales arm in Torrance, Calif. “Right now we are looking at the preliminary evaluation by [the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration]. We will respond to it and work with them on it.”
Tags: Toyota, Toyota Discloses Recall Details, Toyota Recall
Toyota, Honda go separate ways on sports cars
Posted by admin on Oct 21, 2009
By Chang-Ran Kim, Asia autos correspondent
CHIBA, Japan (Reuters) - Japanese archrivals Toyota Motor Corp and Honda Motor Co have just found something else to disagree about: sports cars.
At the Tokyo Motor Show on Wednesday, Toyota took the wraps off the Lexus LFA, a two-seater supercar with a roaring 4.8-liter V10 engine that can reach speeds of 325 km per hour (200 miles per hour) and go from zero to 100 kilometers kph (60 mph) in 3.7 seconds.
It’s a car that flies in the face of the automaker’s image as a pioneer of greener vehicles but one that Toyota’s new boss, Akio Toyoda, says is crucial for cars to remain a product that consumers can get excited about as motorization spreads to more corners of the world.
Toyota, the world’s biggest automaker, is planning to limit LFA production to 500 units, between December 2010 and December 2012, taking orders for the $375,000 car starting on Wednesday.
“It’s our mission as automakers to offer cars that possess the ‘fun’ spirit that should be at the base of any car,” Toyota President Akio Toyoda said at the unveiling, noting he had been involved in the LFA’s development from its early stages.
Ask his counterpart at Honda, though, and the LFA is old-fashioned. The future, Takanobu Ito says, is about clean, sustainable cars, and sports cars are no exception.
“Sure, there are folks who like that ‘vroom’ of the engine out of nostalgia,” Ito told Reuters earlier this month. “But those people are stuck in the past.”
Japan’s No.2 automaker had been preparing a successor model for its legendary NSX sports car, also with a V10 engine, but ditched those plans last year citing an urgent need to save money amid the economic downturn and the growing consumer shift toward greener cars.
“The era of V10 engines is gone,” said Ito, who betrayed no sense of regret over the canned project despite having designed the ground-breaking all-aluminum body on the NSX back in 1990.
ZERO-EMISSION SPORTS CAR?
Ito has other ideas for what a sports car for the next generation could look like: a zero-emission fuel-cell car like Honda’s FCX Clarity, which is currently on lease in limited numbers in the United States and Japan.
Honda has never billed the sleek, hydrogen-powered sedan as a sports car, but Ito said it had all the characteristics to qualify.
“It’s light because it’s not weighed down by a ton of batteries,” he said in a jab at the battery-powered electric sports machines built by U.S. start-up Tesla Motors.
“When you weigh a car down like that, it undermines the characteristics of a sports car.
“But if you have a light car like the FCX Clarity that’s powered by a motor, you get maximum torque from a zero start and acceleration is incredible. In a way, that’s a sports car.”
(Editing by Chris Gallagher)
Tags: Honda go separate ways on sports cars, Toyota
Toyota Electric Concept Car
Posted by admin on Dec 27, 2008
With what has to be the most cryptic press release ever to emerge from Toyota’s Torrance, California-based media group, the company announced in two short sentences that it will be revealing a battery-powered electric concept car at the 2009 North America International Auto Show in Detroit. At the same time, it released a close-up view of a logo that the car will carry. No other details of the car were revealed.
The last dedicated electric car the company manufactured was the E-Com, a small two-seat runabout, built in limited numbers during the late 1990s. Toyota also manufactured some 1,500 RAV4 EVs, which were battery versions of the company’s popular small sport utility vehicle. Several hundred continue to operate in California, Florida and elsewhere. These vehicles are powered by NiMH batteries.
Through its joint venture with Panasonic in Japan, Toyota is developing advanced lithium ion batteries for future hybrids and presumably also for electric cars. Earlier this year, it also formed a special battery research unit to identify and investigate more powerful chemistries beyond lithium, in the hope of finding batteries that allow electric cars to drive further and last longer.
From the lessons learned on the RAV4 and E-Com, it can be assumed the concept car will be a four-passenger model that is intended to be a urban commuter, which could someday compete against a short list of other electric cars in the works from companies like Nissan, Tesla, Pininfarina-Bollore,Think and BYD, the latter slated to debut a production battery version of its F3DM plug-in hybrid in 2009.
Tags: Concept Car, Toyota, Toyota Announces Electric Concept Car