Mitsubishi Motors Pulls a Volkswagen; Shares Drop (reuters.com)

Reader Zane C. writes: The president of Japan's sixth largest auto corporation has admitted to manipulating test data on fuel economy (mileage test data) for 625,000 total eK Wagon and eK Space models, as well as the Dayz and Dayz Roox models produced for Nissan Motors. The tests overstated fuel efficiency by 5 percent to 10 percent. The offending models have been taken off the market until the problem is fixed, and foreign markets are being investigated for similar violations. Upon the announcement of the manipulations, Mitsubishi's stock dropped 15% and it lost 1.2 billion dollars in market value. The company apologized for the deception and said that it is investigating the employees involved. According to Mitsubishi, it was Nissan's in-house testers that discovered the discrepancy between the cars' published fuel efficiency data, and their real-life results. The affected models are sold exclusively in Japan.

Comments

Denial of emissions...

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

He who articulated it, particulated it!

lol

[Type44Q]

Just the names of those models merits his ass stepping the hell down.

Re:lol

[justthinkit]

Japanese words that are "English sounding" are part of their Katakana syllabary. For example, "ice cream" becomes 'Ai su' 'ku ri mu' or Aisu Kurimu.

Beats the heck out of English where we expect people to remember how to pronounce words like 'rendezvous' even though it only makes sense with French intonation and thus ends up yet another exception.

In thinking a bit further about this, given that we no longer teach syllabic pronunciation in American public schools, and Americans are plummeting down the intelligence curve, whereas Japanese are among the smartest and certainly most well-read in the world, maybe there is merit in insisting that words fit within the "two characters per kana" systems of hiragana and katakana.

They all did

[hawguy]

Clearly all of the manufacturers used similar tricks, that's why they didn't point the finger at VW earlier. I'm sure they all knew about it since VW had such good emissions and fuel economy that the other manufacturers must have done tests and tear downs of their own to figure out how VW did it. But no one wanted to rock the boat and invite more scrutiny from regulators.

Re:They all did

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

This. It was a reporter who "busted" the story. If people think the Big Three are gonne get out of this scott free, guess again. That's why hypergiant penalties on VW won't happen.

Re:They all did

[Aighearach]

There is actually very little that is similar between this and what Volkswagen did. It is like saying that a shoplifter "pulls a Blackbeard" or something. In this case, they lied about their fuel economy to increase sales. In the other case, they sold cars with completely illegal emissions and built them to detect an emissions test and cheat on it.

Your claim about "no one wanted to rock the boat" is horse shit. The regulators who uncovered the VW cheat have been testing other manufacturers too, and nobody else appears to be doing that thing. The reason that nobody pointed the finger at VW is that they don't all buy competitors cars and road test the emissions. They test things like comfort and performance of competitors, they don't attempt to re-create all their regulatory compliance. They spend that money on their own compliance! That testing is expensive, and they don't really benefit from it. Performance testing of competitors they do benefit from, because it is more likely to lead to engineering insights.

Re:Ouch

[jellomizer]

Also VW had a big marketing campaign showing how Clean Diesel was so much more better than Hybrid cars. Touting their superior gas mileage and green creds, vs those lame priuses. Showing VW was just flat lying about it, despite a full marketing hype. Mitsubishi, at least in America, may had posted fuel economy, but they weren't doing their big sales push because of it.

Re:Ouch

[mspohr]

In addition to up to 35x higher NOx emissions, VW also admitted that CO2 and fuel consumption were not reported accurately (i.e. they lied).
I guess you will only care about NOx if you get lung cancer, asthma, emphysema or heart disease.
Wikipedia has a good write-up on the problems:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...