Toyota Motor Corp. (TM, Financial), the leading car maker from Japan, announced a week back that it was scheduling a recall of approximately 1.67 million vehicles worldwide. The move was a part of the drive by the company to check for defects including faulty brakes and problems with fuel components arising in vehicles manufactured by the company between January 2005 and September 2010. The cars were having problems with their fuel delivery pipes, which raised the risk of leaking fuel and potentially leading to fires.
The company has also said that there have been complaints regarding defective brake systems, affecting some Crown Majesta, Crown, Noah and Voxy models produced between June 2007 and June 2012. The Crown Majesta is sold in Japan and China and the Noah is sold only in Asia. To date in 2014, the car-maker has been forced to recall 5,273,802 vehicles in the U.S. in 18 recalls.
The company has also been facing issues regarding the safety standards to be met by vehicles in the US. The inflator mechanisms of some of the cars manufactured by Toyota and General Motors have reportedly ruptured, causing metal fragments to fly out when the bags are deployed in crashes. The records have suggested that at least four people have died from the problem and there have been multiple injuries. On Monday alone, Toyota had to recall as many as 247,000 older model vehicles including the Lexus SC, Corolla, Matrix, Sequoia and Tundra, all of which have reported crash bag and engine failures.
The crash incidences have been confirmed by the company. The company officials have gone on to announce that during tests, air bags showed vulnerability to failure during crashes. Things haven’t gone well for the company of late. In June, it expanded a 2013 recall list involving a defective passenger-seat air bag. The initial recall affected 2.14 million vehicles world-wide, of which 310,000 were in Japan and 1.83 million were overseas.
Other models that have been scheduled to be recalled include some 1.05 million vehicles in Japan and 615,000 overseas, covering Toyota models Crown Majesta, Crown, Noah, Voxy, Corolla Rumion and Auris, as well as more than a dozen Lexus models. This adds to the 802,000 Crown Majesta, Crown, Noah and Voxy models manufactured between June 2007 and June 2012 that have been recalled. Car makers have faced heightened global scrutiny on how quickly they share information with regulators and the public since a massive recall crisis in 2009 battered Toyota's reputation and sales. Most vehicle recalls are issued on a voluntary rather than mandatory basis. The engineers and technicians are working to replace a rubber seal ring in the brake master cylinder to prevent brake fluid from leaking. If brake fluid has already leaked, the brake booster will be replaced. Toyota recalled 6.39 million vehicles globally in April in its second largest recall announcement ever. Two months later, the company issued a recall of almost 2.3 million vehicles globally for faulty airbag inflators that have also plagued other car makers.
Conclusion:
A second round of recalls consisting of about 759,000 vehicles globally, including 423,000 in the United States, will fix faulty fuel delivery pipes that could, in the worst-case scenario, cause a fire through a fuel leak. The company also plans to recall 190,000 front-wheel drive Corolla Rumion and Auris models built between October 2006 and October 2014 that aren't equipped with an idling feature to fix a defective fuel evaporative emission control unit. The company’s shares have been down-trading at 0.03%. The shares closed at 5,990 yen at the Tokyo Stock Exchange. With the company not doing well and the circumstances not favoring the performance in the market, it waits to be seen how well Toyota will come back in the fourth quarter.
