Toyota President apologises for global recall

Toyota's top executive has broken his silence regarding his company's worst crisis in years. Company President and CEO Akio Toyoda, grandson of the brand's founder Kiichiro Toyoda, said he was sorry for the recalls.

"I would like to take this opportunity to apologise from the bottom of my heart for causing many of our customers concern after the recalls across several models in several regions," he was quoted. "Believe me, Toyota cars are safe."

Confidence in Toyota has plummeted steadily over the past couple of weeks due to these problems. Company stocks have lost about US$30 billion in value since the start of the crisis but bounced back a little on Friday after better-than-expected quarterly financial results. In the past decade or so about 8 million Toyota cars have been recalled. Up to 19 crash deaths in the US were blamed on the accelerator problem over that period.

Meanwhile another headache for the world's largest automaker in sales seems to be developing fast. So far 124 complaints have been logged by the U.S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) regarding the Prius brake problem but Toyota says it has already instituted a software fix for it.