Prius owners are raising questions about the adequacy of Toyota’s attempts over the last five years to stop overheating in the Prius' electrical system.
Jordan Felo of Portland, Ore., was surprised to learn of a defect in the Toyota Prius hybrid system that caused an inverter in his 2010 Prius to overheat and fail.
Originally, Toyota issued a safety recall in 2014 to address the inverter defect in model years 2010 to 2014, an attempt to fix the problem on about 800,000 cars in the U.S. by modifying software that controls the hybrid electrical system.in Southern California, Roger Hogan, told the manufacturer in 2017 that he was seeing inverter failures on vehicles that had received the software modification.
The Prius is designed so that if the inverter fails, the car enters a fail-safe mode, known as limp-home, in which it can move slowly out of traffic to “enhance safety,” the company statement said. The 2018 recall was aimed at fixing the vehicle’s potential failure to enter limp-home, the company said in both its statement and a regulatory filing.
In one case, a Marina del Rey woman had to cross three lanes of fast-moving traffic on the 91 Freeway. In another case, a Florida woman was rear-ended. The crash left her with a cracked vertebra and a punctured lung, she said. “Unfortunately, there’s been a trend of manufacturers trying to turn safety recalls into what sound like performance-related technical bulletins,” Levine said. “It’s deceptive and it’s dangerous.”
The NHTSA’s chief counsel, Jonathan Morrison, told Carmen in a meeting last month that it was Hogan’s complaint and the evidence of a charred inverter that prompted the new recall. Morrison did not return calls seeking comment. The Times submitted a series of written questions to NHTSA public affairs officials, but they did not provide answers after several days.
Toyota of Claremont refused to sell these Priuses because it believes a power system defect makes them unsafe. From left are Roger Hogan Jr., general sales manager at Toyota San Juan Capistrano, owner Roger Hogan, and Stephen Hogan, general manager at Toyota of Claremont. “They said you have become an enemy of Toyota and that you clearly don’t want to be in the Toyota family,” said Hogan. He describes himself and his family-run operation as longtime Toyota loyalists. Nonetheless, Toyota is cutting deliveries to him of its most popular models, claiming he is not meeting his sales quotas and failing to make warranty inspections for his customers, he said.
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