Toyota recall hits Chinese sales
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Toyota's massive vehicle recall because of defective accelerators is not only triggering a crisis of confidence in the Japanese car maker in China but also impacting its new car sales.
A dealer for FAW Toyota Motor Co, which produces the RAV 4 sport-utility vehicle that will be recalled in China due to sticky accelerators, said sales had dropped by a third over the past week.
"We have received about 30 orders for February so far, which is less than a month earlier," said a salesman surnamed Gong from JinJiang Toyota Sales Co, which also sells Crown, Reiz and Corolla models.
Besides the flat sales performance in the non-prime sales season during the Chinese New Year holiday, Gong said the decline was partly driven by the recall. "There have been owners of other models coming to us to inquire whether the same problem could have happened on their cars," he added.
Following the recall of nearly 8 million vehicles and the suspension of eight popular models in the United States and Japan, about 75,552 Chinese-made RAV 4 SUVs are due to be retrieved from the end of this month to fix similar faults.
However, Gong said the impact of the recall was not as big as expected because "no casualties have been reported in China and the recall in China is minor compared with the United States and Japan."
Analysts said the global recall has cast a shadow on Toyota's bid to catch up with major international rivals, including General Motors and Volkswagen, in China.
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