Mitsubishi Lied About Vehicle Emissions for 25 Years
Following VW’s smog-testing cheating scandal in September, Mitsubishi on Tuesday announced that its employees used outdated emissions testing methods outlawed in Japan on millions of vehicles sold since 1991.
The outdated methods violated Japanese regulatory standards and provided deceptively low results for emissions measurements. The environmental impact of Mitsubishi’s decades-long deception is as of yet still undetermined.
The New York Times reports:
Mitsubishi “said it had been submitting non-compliant data to Japan’s transport ministry since 1991,” Reuters reported, while the company “previously said such non-compliance went back only to at least 2002.”
Mitsubishi’s deception only applied to cars sold in Japan; the fuel tests Mitsubishi used are allowed by U.S. regulators.
“Tetsuro Aikawa, Mitsubishi Motors’ president, said an inquiry led by three external lawyers had been opened,” the BBC reported. “We don’t know the whole picture and we are in the process of trying to determine that. I feel a great responsibility,” the news broadcaster quoted Aikawa as saying.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT
The revelation has cut the value of the automobile giant in half, CNN Money reports. “JPMorgan auto analyst Akira Kishimoto estimated the cheating could cost Mitsubishi more than 50 billion yen ($450 million), including payments to consumers, the cost of replacing parts and compensation to Nissan,” writes teleSUR.
Mitsubishi’s admission brought to fruition observers’ expectation that the VW scandal would give rise to further revelations of emissions standards cheating throughout the auto industry.
“Is this happening in other countries and is this happening at other manufacturers?” John German of the International Council for Clean Transportation (ICCT), a European-based NGO, declared when news of VW’s scandal broke last fall.
Some Mitsubishi executives appeared to have been in the dark about their company’s widespread cheating.
“Ryugo Nakao, executive vice president, said Japanese regulations changed in 1991 to require testing methods to better reflect stop-and-go urban driving,” Reuters writes, “but Mitsubishi Motors did not follow that rule change. ‘We should have switched, but it turns out we didn’t,’ he said.”
Our work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Feel free to republish and share widely.
Click Here: All Blacks Rugby Jersey