Recent complaints over the Coralla’s power steering add to the woes of Toyota’s engineers and managers. Although no formal decision has been made on what action to take on the range, it is hard to see where this flood of problems is going to end for Toyota.
It has been a turbulent time for Toyota. Problems that originated from a faulty accelerator have spread to the brakes in the Prius and now there seem to be possible problems with the Corolla, their biggest selling car.
So far a total of 8.5 million vehicles have been recalled worldwide. The issues started with complaints of accelerator pedals getting stuck underneath floor mats across the range of their cars in the US but not in the UK. Later and un-related problem with the accelerator sticking was found in cars worldwide.
To further the situation, the company’s flagship model, the hybrid Prius, was found to have suspected issues with its braking system. The recall for this started in Japan but quickly spread to Europe affecting almost a million vehicles in total.
These issues are said to have been solved in cars in Europe and Japan. The Prius has been re-released with a new braking system designed to cut power when both the brake and accelerator are applied at the same time, therefore also safe guarding themselves if the accelerator problems reoccur.
In the US however, Toyota continue to suspend production and sales of eight models until all problems have been addressed and solved. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the US are now investigating the recalls to determine whether they reacted fast enough. Toyota must now provide the appropriate paper work to show when they first noticed the issues and when they started the recall. It is a Federal law that the gap between these two events be no more than 5 days.
