Loss of power over 20,000 Toyota bZ series/Lexus RZ/Subaru Solterra overseas recall

Recently, Toyota, Subaru and Lexus issued a recall announcement for the US market, involving a total of 20,991 pure electric vehicles. The recall covers 11,495 Toyota bZ series models, 4,739 Lexus RZs and 4,757 Subaru Solterra (parameters | inquiry), with production cycles concentrated between April 2025 and April 2026. The recall reason refers to the software failure of the battery ECU, which has the hidden danger of memory data conflict. According to documents submitted by Toyota to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the fault is rooted in two integrated circuits within the battery ECU, with occasional duplicate overwriting of the same memory address data. When this happens multiple times, the ECU will not be able to pass the running self-test, which may eventually lead to a complete shutdown of the drive system without warning. At this time, the power steering and brake assistance functions of the vehicle can still be used normally, but the drive power will be completely lost, and the fault may occur at any speed, and it may also affect the pre-collision system (PCS) and the vehicle stability control system (VSC). It is worth noting that Toyota found similar memory coverage problems as early as 2025 when developing the plug-in hybrid model, but at that time it believed that the different operation cycles of electric vehicles would not be affected. Until April 2026, engineers found evidence of this fault in electric vehicles when remotely diagnosing the data review, and subsequent tests confirmed that conflicts were more likely to occur when the CPU load increased at low power. At present, Toyota has only received 1 related warranty claim with no incident report. In response to this recall, the owner does not need to stop using the car or take special parking measures, just go to the brand authorized dealer to complete the free battery ECU software update, which can completely solve the problem.