The Japanese company, the world’s biggest auto maker, was forced to make the announcement today due to a fault that can make cars suddenly stop.
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The recall was to repair a software glitch, the carmaker said.
The latest call back affected the Prius V, which is also sold as the Prius Alpha and Prius+, as well as some Auris hybrid vehicles.
Toyota Motor Corporation has announced a recall of around 650,000 of its Prius V hybrids to attend to a potential software malfunction that “could, in limited cases, shut down the hybrid system while the auto is being driven” (Reuters). With the current, incorrect factory settings, affected cars may send too much power through certain transistors on the power circuit boards of the ECU in question, causing them to be subjected to higher than normal thermal stresses.
More than half the recalled vehicles were sold in Japan with most of the others in North America and Europe between May 2010 and November 2014. When that happens, instead of allowing it to continue and break, the vehicle enters a failsafe mode, shuts down, and brings the car to a halt.
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Owners of the vehicles, which are traceable through registration data, will be contacted by Toyota New Zealand. Most of these have been directly related to faulty Takata airbags, and there’s a odd comfort to knowing that they were all a result of the same problem as opposed to a number of different problems that car manufacturers have had.
