If you own Toyota shares, sell now. These problems are long term.

So Toyota is about to recall 270,000 Prius models. According to Japanese newspapers, it has told dealers it will bow to pressure and inspect the braking systems of these cars after owners complained that the brakes were failing on bumpy roads.

The recall follows Toyota already recalling cars after accelerator problems. A pattern has been established. And Toyota's reputation has been shot.

As Frank Ahrens writes in the Washington Post, Toyota's fortress like reputation has been damaged, perhaps forever. In the long term, it kills the idea that Japanese cars have superior quality. And in the short term, Toyota's big issue is that new problems keep coming up. It's made even worse by the fact that the Prius is the best Toyota can offer.

The damage to its reputation will be hard to fix. As Ahrens writes: "Other companies have recovered from catastrophic public relations disasters. After seven Chicago deaths were traced to cyanide-laced Tylenol in 1982, drugmaker Johnson & Johnson responded by quickly recalling all Tylenol nationwide, destroying the company's market share. But the company's swift action and pioneering, tamper-proof packaging won back its customers within a year. For an automaker, reputation is everything, and it can linger for years even after the facts prove it otherwise. When Japanese cars hit U.S. shores in the early '70s, they were seen as cheaply made and unsafe. Chastened, the Japanese automakers retrenched and doubled down on quality. By the late 1980s, Toyota and Honda, above the rest, were besting their American counterparts every year in quality, reliability, even performance and styling, auto and consumer magazines raved. For Toyota, that reputation lasted, pretty much intact, until last month - despite the fact that, in 2007, Consumer Reports raised flags that Toyota quality was slipping."

Toyota president Akio Toyoda's feeble apology ("I apologize from the bottom of my heart for all the concern that we have given to so many customers") hasn't helped because he failed to give undertakings that the company would actually fix the problem. And there lies the problem. "In moments of a business crisis, people want to see [the head of] a company take full responsibility, be empathic to the victims and their families and be in control by outlining the problem and how they intend to solve it," Ong Hock Chuan, from crisis management firm Maverick in Jakarta told the BBC."Toyota seems to have failed on all counts. Its admission of the problem has been half-hearted and almost reluctant, it has failed to apologise unequivocally to victims and their families, and it's failed to articulate and communicate what it intends to do to regain control of the situation."

As The Economist says, there is no quick fix to Toyota's problems. "Whether Toyota will speedily recover from this setback or suffer permanent harm is uncertain, but the betting must be on the latter. As the recriminations continue and the company's public-relations machine stumbles, the aura that surrounded the firm and allowed it to grow rapidly in recent years, even while charging premium prices, is being dispelled. Other carmakers, notably Ford and the ambitious Volkswagen Group, have closed the quality gap and are offering more interesting cars. Korea's Hyundai is unapologetic about seeing Toyota's (and corporate Japan's) loss as its gain. Toyota still has great strengths, not least financial, but it has lost something precious and may never get it back."