County inspects Prius for brake problems

A federal transportation officials opened an investigation into brake problems in the 2010 Prius and Toyota ordered a recall of the hybrid model, Los Angeles County officials moved Thursday to determine if any of the vehicles are in the county's fleet. Troy Anderson in the Daily News.

In recent years, the county has purchased about 300 Priuses as part of a larger effort to make the 12,000-vehicle county fleet more fuel efficient and to combat climate change, Sandoval said. The county has about 400 hybrid vehicles currently.

"We were scrambling to identify what we had," said Joe Sandoval, general manager of purchasing and services for the county's Internal Services Department. "We wanted to get them switched out. We have one 2010 Prius in inventory and it belongs to one of the supervisors' board deputies. So what we did was swap it out with a motor pool vehicle."