Weeks after agreeing to pay the largest criminal penalty ever by an automaker for hiding safety defects from the public, Toyota on Wednesday announced a wide-ranging recall of nearly 6.4 million vehicles worldwide for problems with air bags that may not deploy or seats that could move in a crash.
The recall, which includes nearly 1.8 million vehicles in the United States, brings Toyota’s recall tally for 2014 to almost 2.9 million vehicles in the United States, well ahead of its pace from last year. General Motors faces a criminal investigation of its own over its decade-long failure to recall millions of cars to fix a defect that it has tied to 13 deaths.
