Toyota, the Japanese car giant on Friday made an official announcement that it is recalling 2.43 million hybrid cars over a fault that could result in crashes.
The announcement comes barely a month after the carmaker said that it was pulling over a million hybrid cars off the global market for a technical glitch that could spark fires.
Also, in 2016, Toyota recalled a total of 3.37 million vehicles across the globe due to problems with airbags and a fuel emission control unit.
The Friday recall covers the latest models of Toyota’s Prius and its Auris hybrid. These are the vehicles that were manufactured from October 2008 to November 2014.
The country’s population itself has more than a million of these cars whereas, in North America, the total number of the hybrids sold is approximately 830,000. Europe has 290,000 of the affected cars with the number in China standing at 3,000. The rest are in the other parts of the world.
Some of the cars included in the latest recall had already been involved in previous recall announcement in 2014 and 2015, Toyota said in a statement, but “the remedy conducted then did not anticipate the new condition identified in this recall.”
According to Toyota, some of these vehicles, on rare occasions, could fail to switch to a “failsafe” driving mode in case of a fault with the hybrid system. The result is power loss and subsequently stalling.
“If this occurs, the vehicle could lose power and stall. While power steering and braking would remain operational, a vehicle stall while driving at higher speeds could increase the risk of a crash,” Toyota said.
Although reports of crashes are not everywhere, the carmaker says it will reach out to the affected customers through direct mail for arrangements on how to have their cars checked alongside having their vehicle’s software updated by their local Toyota dealer free of charge.