[TOYOTA]looking forward
Toyota Motor Corporation is a multinational corporation headquartered in Japan. At its peak, Toyota Corporation employed approximately 320,000 people worldwide. It is the world largest automobile maker by sales.
It was founded by Kiichiro Toyoda in 1937 as a spinoff of his father's company Toyota Industries to create automobiles.
Toyota has issued a worldwide recall for about 437,000 of its flagship Prius and other hybrid vehicles in the latest of a series of embarrassing safety problems to hit the Japanese carmaker.
"We have decided to recall as we regard safety for our customers as our foremost priority," Akio Toyoda, the company's president, told a press conference in Tokyo on Tuesday.
The recall follows complaints from Toyota owners in the US and Japan about a delay under some condition when the brakes in the Prius are pressed.
Toyota officials had earlier informed Japan's transport ministry about the Prius recall, with grim-faced company bosses bowing before ranks of assembled media.
The recall in Japan covers about 223,000 vehicles, with most of the rest of the affected cars thought to have been sold in the US – Toyota's biggest market.
Toyota says it has fixed the software programming glitch in Prius vehicles that have gone on sale since last month, but not those sold before, starting last May. "Let me reassure that we will redouble our commitment to quality as the lifeline of our company," Toyoda told reporters at Tuesday's press conference. The company's reputation for quality and reliability has been severely dented in recent weeks by a series of recalls of around eight million vehicles due to sticking accelerator pedals.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) in the US says it has opened a formal investigation into Prius-related complaints of "momentary loss of braking capability while travelling over an uneven road surface, pothole or bump".
The NHTSA has received nearly 200 such complaints since February 3, including four reports of accidents, two of them said to have resulted in injury.
Despite its problems, Toyota's shares, which have lost about a fifth of their value since late January, were up 1.7 per cent early on Tuesday.
Hiroaki Osakabe, a fund manager at Chibagin Asset Management, said Toyota shares fell while the company "appeared not to be doing anything to deal with its problems".
"But now, the fact that they're taking concrete steps on the issue is being seen as positive," he said.
He warned, however, that "the gains will be limited since many investors want to see the impact of the problems on US car sales, with more share selling ahead if there's a big drop".
In this issue, I was disappointed very much because many mobiles running in every corner of the streets
