Toyota recall hits 3.37m cars amid airbag and emissions issues

Meanwhile, 12,740 Toyota cars -3,540 Prius and 9,200 Lexus CT200h – will have to be recalled in July because of a problem with their emission control units, Hotai said, adding that it will take about three hours to fix each unit.

It must be noted here that this particular recall isn’t related to the massive Takata airbag recalls that have been dooming the global automotive industry for about a year. It has indeed recalled 170 units of the hybrid Prius in the country as a part of its global recall of 1.43 million vehicles – just a precautionary step to potentially defective airbags, it said in a statement.

Toyota TM -0.41% on Wednesday said evaporative fuel emissions control units in models produced from 2006 to 2015 including the Prius, Auris compact hatchback and its popular Corolla models were prone to cracks, which could expand over time and lead to fuel leaks.

Toyota said it discovered that some inflators could have a small crack in the welded area joining the chambers, which could grow over time and lead to the separation of the chambers in vehicles parked and unoccupied for a period of time and risk injuring the passengers.

Toyota also doubled a recall order over faulty airbags to almost 34 million vehicles in 2015, in a record-breaking recall move prior to the window glitch.

The announcement by Toyota means that overall the total numbers of recalls because of air bag worries likely now tally more than 100 million globally. Autoliv said about 90 percent of the affected inflators were in Prius cars.

Toyota said no deaths or injuries have been reported as a result of the latest airbag-related saga, and noted that the airbag inflators involved in the latest recall were not produced by embattled Takata Corporation. However, this recall is not linked to Takata Corp. The stock fell as much as 16 pct to 765 Swedish kronas on the Stockholm Stock Exchange, their lowest since December 2014.