Toyota Motor Corp. is finding itself in a bit of a snag these days with a rise in global recalls and a legal probe into its recall practices underway. Thus, Japan’s top automaker has promised to improve further its quality efforts, recognizing that this is a very important step to ensuring continued growth for the profitable automaker. Toyota is known worldwide for producing safe, reliable and high quality vehicles. However, the automaker has issued a recall for more than a million vehicles in Japan, this year alone. Recently, Toyota has also issued a recall of almost half a million SUVs in the US.

Meanwhile, Toyota is also being criminally investigated whether its quality-control officials had wrongfully delayed a recall issue that could have prevented an accident in 2004 which injured a family of five. In response to questions over the quality of its vehicles, Toyota president Katsuaki Watanabe said that “The world-class quality that we’ve built is our lifeline. There will be no growth without an improvement in quality. This is the biggest task that this management team must undertake,” Meanwhile, despite these problems, Toyota is still well on its way to achieve its group-based sales forecast of 8.85 million units and production forecast of 9.06 million units for 2006.