**UPDATED** Toyota Prius Recall Now Affects Australia

Toyota -- Japanese for 'the brakes don't work'. ©

As flagged in our developing story on the Toyota vehicle recall over the past few days, Toyota has now announced a worldwide recall of certain models of the Prius hybrid car.

This recall affects Australia, and covers Priuses (or is it Priusi?) sold between July 2009 and January 2010.

Reports indicate affected Prius customers will be contacted directly by Toyota, asking them to return their vehicles to a repair centre (presumably, the location from which the car was purchased) for a software upgrade said to take only about an hour. Obviously, the upgrade will be free of charge.

Reportedly, some 2378 Australian Priuses are affected. The recall apparently does not affect other Toyota or Lexus brands, including any other Toyota/Lexus hybrid models.

The software upgrade is designed to fix a glitch in the Prius brake system resulting in reports from drivers of "inconsistent" (read: unreliable) brake 'feel' in situations like driving over pot holes or on slippery or icy surfaces.

As we have done in recent days, we'll keep this story updated as quickly as we can, especially with news affecting Australian customers.

More detail on the impact of this now global recall of various Toyota brand vehicles can be found here.