Toyota recalls more than 400,000 Priuses, other hybrid cars

Toyota on Tuesday announced another global recall -- this time involving more than 400,000 Priuses and other hybrid cars with braking problems -- on the same day that the U.S. Transportation Department said it was reviewing driver complaints about hard-to-handle steering on the 2009-10 Toyota Corolla.

The one-two punch was only the latest bad news for the Japanese auto giant, which built its global reputation on reliability.

Toyota President Akio Toyoda used extraordinary language at a news conference in Tokyo to apologize for quality and safety issues that have led to the recall of more than 7 million vehicles in recent months.

He said three times that Toyota was neither failure-proof nor "omnipotent" and vowed to "redouble our commitment to quality as the lifeline of our company."

The recall will fix a software glitch in the brake systems of the Prius and other hybrid models that apparently has caused brief and sometimes frightening delays in perceived braking capacity on icy or bumpy roads.

The fix, which dealers can make in about 40 minutes, will apply to 223,000 hybrids sold in Japan, along with 133,000 Prius cars and 14,500 Lexus HS250h vehicles in the United States. Nearly 53,000 Priuses are also being recalled in Europe. The recall begins in Japan on Wednesday and in the United States "as soon as possible," the company said.

At the same time, Toyota is facing increasing skepticism from U.S. lawmakers that its 2009 recall -- 3.8 million vehicles for floor mats that can "entrap" gas pedals -- has been effective.

"There appears to be a growing body of evidence that neither Toyota nor [the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration] have identified all the causes of sudden unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles," said an internal memo generated by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which has scheduled a Feb. 24 hearing on the floor mat issue. "Moreover, there is substantial evidence that remedies such as redesigned floor mats have failed to solve the problem."

On the Corolla, 2009's fifth-best-selling car, the NHTSA is looking into more than 80 complaints that the vehicle can veer left or right at highway speeds.

"I purchased [a] 2010 Toyota Corolla in November of 2009, and since then I am having [a] problem with the steering wheel," one driver wrote to the agency. "I can not keep the vehicle driving straight on the freeway. I think it is very dangerous."

The Transportation Department has not launched a formal investigation into the Corolla steering, as it did last week with the Prius brakes. Instead, the agency is reviewing the Corolla complaints "as we do with all complaints," said spokeswoman Olivia Alair.

Also yesterday, car-sharing firm Zipcar said it has pulled the recalled Prius from its fleet. Priuses make up fewer than 1 percent of all Zipcars, the company said.

In explaining the problem with the new model's brakes, Toyoda said it might have occurred because designers and engineers "wanted to pursue more comfortable braking" for drivers.

The 2010 model uses a two-stage braking system that includes regenerative braking to capture energy from the wheels, as well as conventional hydraulic brakes. But on snowy or icy roads, the brakes can "seem to soften for a split second" when an anti-lock braking system kicks in, the company president explained.

The delay is not the same as brake failure, and no accidents or injuries have been reported because of the problem, he said. But Toyoda and Shinichi Sasaki, vice president of quality control at Toyota, said at the news conference that complaints about the braking issue have been increasing in recent months.

"Giving the highest priority to safety of customers, we thought we simply cannot judge that there will never be accidents" caused by the brakes, said Sasaki, explaining why the recall was ordered.

The chief of the recall department at Japan's Transport Ministry said Toyota should have acted sooner. "If the company had paid more attention to consumers' viewpoint, it could have realized that there was a safety problem," Ryusuke Itazaki told reporters.

At its factories in Japan in January, Toyota modified the software program for brakes on the Prius -- but it did so without notifying earlier buyers of the 2010 model that there might be a problem.

Toyoda was asked Tuesday about that delay and did not respond directly. Instead, he repeated what seemed to be his primary talking point for the news conference, which was that Toyota is not "all-knowing," that it does make mistakes, but that he personally is going to ensure that the company learns from its recent problems.