The news is something no car owner wants to hear. Power steering on their hard-to-get hybrid could fail. Tires on their small pickups could bulge and possibly burst. Air bags may not inflate during a crash.
These recalls are the type that have long bedeviled American carmakers, but this time it is Toyota, long known as the very best for quality.
Just as Toyota appears poised to pass General Motors to become the world's largest automaker by sales, it has a growing problem with recalls that is sullying its carefully honed image.
In the United States, Toyota's largest market, the number of vehicles recalled soared to 2.2 million last year. That was double the number of vehicles recalled in 2004, and more than 10 times the 200,000 cars it recalled in 2003, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
In Japan, the number of recalled vehicles has jumped 41-fold since 2001, to 1.9 million last year. And because many of the recalls are for vehicles that are more than 10 years old, analysts fear that another wave of bad quality news may be in store.
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