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Mitsubishi: We've Been Cheating On Fuel Tests For 25 years (cnn.com)
An anonymous reader cites an article on CNN:The situation at Mitsubishi Motors just went from bad to much, much worse. The Japanese automaker admitted Tuesday that it had falsified fuel efficiency tests for the past quarter century (warning: annoying autoplay videos, alternate source), the latest revelation in a scandal that has rocked the company. The automaker said last week that it had used improper fuel economy tests on hundreds of thousands of vehicles, including some sold to Nissan. Cars with inflated fuel efficiency ratings were sold only in Japan. Mitsubishi said it would ask lawyers from outside the company to investigate the tests.
...will be committing sudoku over this.
Mitsubishi execs later clarified that they tried to sell said cars in the U.S, but no one bought any.
Mitchy Bitchy had to make up for all those warplanes they never got to build and sell. Glad to see lying companies aren't just in the USA. Do we get to watch homie fall on his sword??!! ***Disclaimer*** I drive a KIA.
Cheating was so two decades ago
What caused them to admit this now? I didn't find any mention of an enquiry or people noticing the difference. Consciousness?
my sig pwns your sig
Are all car companies trying to look worst than their competitors? "Oh, you think they're bad? Check out what we did!"
I'm just waiting for a car company to come up with a ~$10K electric car now.
Good question, and I think this is because VW management has essentially escaped without criminal charges, now it's a manner of the the CxOs in the car companies getting approval from the board to take the financial hit and put this behind them.
I asked at this earlier, but I think (ie, agree with other /.ers who replied to me) - it's a case where pretty much everyone is complicit - now is a showcase of how and when all the car manufacturers come forward.
Just wish governments would simply mandate remediation as the sale of more electrics or other zero-emissions vehicles (as Elon Musk requested).
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
Fuel economy in the past was never a big seller (Especially in the US) . Sure we may have talked about it. But if gave an option more Pep vs. Better fuel economy. Pep normally won. So there wasn't that much interest in really checking the claims of companies on their cleanness and fuel economy, as it wasn't the reason why we chose that car. However with $4.00 a gallon gas common only a few years ago. Increased media attention on Carbon pollution, and the success of newer energy efficient cars, Hybrid and Electric. Fuel economy has became a selling point. So we are interested in it, thus claims need to be verified. Because we are now buying a car because it is better for the environment. Not buying a car for normally other features, and if it happen to have good milage just be benefit.
So we are now checking it because it is an important factor to consider.
There are tons of products out there that don't meet their specifications or fully say what they suppose to do. However if those extra features don't matter to us, then we really don't care and don't press the issue.
Lets say use Treadmills. They have a calorie calculator on it. Are they accurate? Or do they under estimate so you will work harder, or do the over estimate so you feel better about the results of your exercise. But we don't get or use a Treadmill because we care much about the calorie calculator we use it for exercise.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
What's happening is that you are getting an object lesson in the failure of government regulations. And the causes are not hard to understand: regulations and procedures are written based on lobbying by the corporations being regulated, and the people who implement the regulations have no economic interest in doing a good job and are easily corruptible. And there is no solution to this; what it means is that regulations will always be an inefficient and wasteful approach to solving problems. Sometimes they are necessary, often not.
For automobiles, limits on NOx have been useful in improving air quality and are probably worth it; limits on CO2 emissions from personal automobiles are not worth the trouble because they have a negligible impact on overall US greenhouse gas emissions. For CO2 emissions, a substantial tax increase would be a better mechanism if we wanted to reduce CO2 emissions from driving, but politicians know full well that they couldn't pass that. So, instead, they use CAFE, which amounts to the same thing, but whose economic effects are so obscure that people don't notice.
Dear assholes,
thanks a lot for waiting until we had to pay a crap ton of money to confess that everyone has been doing the same type of things more or less forever.
yours truly,
Volkswagen.
It's fairly easy to test an electric car, just drive it with a fixed amount of energy charge and see how efficient it is.
Zero emissions.
Just saying.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
It's not a failure of government regulations. It's a failure of government to *fund* the agencies who are in charge of enforcing the regulations. People who like to claim that the government is incompetent are also the ones that cause it to be that way by not giving agencies enough resources to do their jobs.
a scandal that has rocked the company
Indeed, their luck couldn't have been better. The executives are dancing in the boardroom. Middle-management has turned up the radio. Production employees are playing air guitar. This rocks!
But couldn't a big part of the problem be that car companies were allowed to do their own fuel economy tests in the first place? Wouldn't it have been smarted to require use of a third-party testing organization, you know, the same way EVERYTHING ELSE is regulated? For example, RF interference, we don't just do the test ourselves, we have to take the equipment out to a certified testing lab. (They do take our word for it that the equipment we give them is essentially the same thing we will ship to customers.)
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The benefited from the falsified data. Now they are benefiting from coming clean. They may get a wrist slap, but it will be nothing compared to all the money they made from the lie, and they will continue to make money anyway.
Getting caught is not a deterrent, which is why big companies do this sort of thing.
Is Japanese a race?
love is just extroverted narcissism
lawl
Because enough news comes out of Japan that it has its own topic.
Personally I'd prefer this post bear the icon of the not-yet-extant "Corporate Malfeasance" topic.
...the cheap crap engines they make for everybody else? Had an '89 Plymouth Grand Voyager, that we got in '93, that ran really, really well for years. In '03, I traded it in for a '97 Plymouth? Chrysler? Grand Voyage, and I have *never* spent so much money on engine repairs. An engineer I knew told me they'd gone from their own engines to Mitsubishi engines, and *then* he started ranting about the crap they were.
Based on my personal experience, with head gaskets (never needed one before), oil pan, which became pump and pan (and yes, I believe in the One and Only Provably True Religion: change your oil ever 4k miles or so), plug wires, I think it was generator or starter....
I don't own one anymore.
mark
Even when the Japanese do it?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The two rogue engineers should definitely get a sternly worded reprimand letter put in the permanent files now...
For automobiles, limits on NOx have been useful in improving air quality and are probably worth it; limits on CO2 emissions from personal automobiles are not worth the trouble because they have a negligible impact on overall US greenhouse gas emissions.
Citation please... There may be greater sources of CO2 than personal automobiles but I very much doubt that their contribution is negligible.
For CO2 emissions, a substantial tax increase would be a better mechanism if we wanted to reduce CO2 emissions from driving, but politicians know full well that they couldn't pass that.
Agreed. Probably the best thing we could do with economic policy to help the environment would be to tax fossil fuels at a higher rate. It would drive economic behavior in reasonable time frames to more sensible alternatives for transportation and industrial fuel use. Sadly you are correct that it wouldn't have a prayer of passing the current Congress in the US.
...that they could get away with it for longer. Japan is a lot more urban so there's a lot more city driving. It's much harder to determine if you're getting worse fuel economy than you were supposed to get when driving conditions already put that fuel economy measurement all over the place.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Oh look, all the foreign companies are lying about fuel efficiency to look better and sell product and bring honor to their families. Ever wonder why a lot of foreign company have "better" test scores on standardized tests and it makes the US appear to be ranked 40th or whatever? I'll give you a hint. It starts with "cheat" and ends with "ing."
All this is completely nonsense. Everybody always knew that fuel efficiency numbers were undervalued, and that nobody could achieve them in practice. After all, what counts is the progress in efficiency and pollution rates, and this progress has been here for real.
No. I'll just start a rickshaw company that will use as labour all the people in these car firms who are found to have colluded with the false results. Choice: 10 years in prison or 2 years rickshaw duty.
Your ideas are intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Aww.. it's so cute that you actually think that any of these people will serve time. The end result of all this will almost certainly be a fine which is far, far less than the profits that the corporations made.
That's a nice rant, but most people look at fuel efficiency for only two reasons:
1. How much will they pay for gas.
2. How far can they drive without refilling the tank.
Because we are now buying a car because it is better for the environment.
No, that's just stupid. If that's what you care about, then don't buy a car... they're ALL bad for the environment in some fashion.
Admitting you have a problem is the first step to recovery.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
yes
Are you kidding? Federal government spending is 25% of GDP, total government spending is nearly 40% of GDP; these numbers have been going up for many decades. At what point do you consider government spending to be "enough"?
To be fair, current federal spending is:
* 68% mailing checks to the old and the poor
* 15% military
* 6% interest
* 11% everything else
We can reduce spending greatly while doubling spending on infrastructure, education, NASA, even enforcing regulations. We'd just have to be willing to mail less money to people. Sadly, those people are now a majority of voters, so it won't happen. (State and local spending is even more dominated by pension plans and related check-mailing.)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The problem is that the spending is on pork projects rather than proper government functions. Starving regulatory agencies and safety net programs to death has been a stated goal of the GOP for a good while. They've been quite open about it from time to time.
Rather than the EPA pay to test every model vehicle released every year, it has the car companies test it themselves. Then the EPA tests a random sample to make sure the car companies were being honest. If a car company decides to cheat, they might get away with it for a few years, but probability says the longer they continue to cheat, the less likely they are to continue to get away with it. If Mitsubishi has been doing this for 25 years and never gotten caught, the Japanese government has apparently never bothered checking automakers' claims.
This practice of sampling is used widely in industry as well. Instead of testing every bottle of Coke to make sure it has the right mix of ingredients, you only test about one in 10,000. If a sample turns up out of spec, it costs less to stop production to fix the problem and discard the bad product between the bad sample and the previous good (in-spec) sample, than it would cost to test every single bottle.
The same misconception - that the best solution is to test everything thoroughly - is driving up auto costs in California. Requiring every car to get a smog inspection every year made sense when a lot of cars were failing. But if the inspection cost is $30 and the cost of letting a polluting car operate for an extra year is (say) $900 of environmental damage, then once the pass rate exceeds 97%, the inspections actually become more expensive than the pollution cost. The solution is more expensive than the problem. The government has reduced inspections to once every 2 years in response, but smog inspection has become a multi-billion dollar business so the gas stations and mechanics lobby to keep requiring them more frequently than they're actually needed.
Pulling a rickshaw is probably a great workout. You could probably get some yuppies to sign up to do it for free. A new fitness craze.
The problem is far different than VWs because it is so easy to verify. Fill car with gas. Drive. Refill. Divide miles driven by gallons used. My Nissan never gets the mileage it says it should, nor what it claims to be getting with inboard electronics. BFD. It's like almost not cheating when it's that easy to check. Consumer Reports will even check for me. But they don't check emissions.
Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.
"We are terribly sorry about this systemic abuse regarding our fuel efficiency numbers. Now, in entirely unrelated news, check out our new line of all-electric vehicles!"
Interestingly, that's about how long it's been since Mitsubishi sent any slightly interesting vehicles to the US. It might not be quite as bad if they hadn't just been making forgettable, disposable appliances for decades.
So, that's whet he meant. I asked the salesman "is this MPG rating for real?" and his replay was " Yes. Want some pancakes bitches?"
Dude, if you feel so passionate about it, why do you post AC? Are you not willing to stand behind what you say?
BTW, Hydroelectric power, ecologically speaking is a nightmare.
Also, you have no fucking idea what you are talking about... at all.
From the EIA site.
In 2015, the United States generated about 4 trillion kilowatthours of electricity.1 About 67% of the electricity generated was from fossil fuels (coal, natural gas, and petroleum).
Major energy sources and percent share of total U.S. electricity generation in 2015:1
Coal = 33%
Natural gas = 33%
Nuclear = 20%
Hydropower = 6%
Other renewables = 7%
Biomass = 1.6%
Geothermal = 0.4%
Solar = 0.6%
Wind = 4.7%
Petroleum = 1%
Other gases = 1%
* 68% mailing checks to the old and the poor
Not sure if intellectually dishonest, or you just don't know...
Expenditures from FICA-filled trusts aren't really fair to include in the list with the others. Even if we didn't send those checks, the government would not have more general money to spend on anything not funded by FICA taxes.
Unless you're proposing spending FICA withheld taxes on infrastructure?
marketing :P
Applying the same "logical" thought process, we could do more good by keeping all of our biological waste inside the house instead of dumping it into the sewers...
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
With no stars in crash testing.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
* 68% mailing checks to the old and the poor
That is very disingenuous, when you consider That of that 68%, more than half is money that people either earned by way of a pension, or already paid in in the form of social security. You have no right to "stop the handouts" when those moneys are in fact owed every bit as much as (if not more) than our vast public debt.
If you want an obvious way to deal with the budget in a rational way, cut the military spending back to a sane level, and tell any politician that wants to get us involved in *any* military conflict to be the first man in and the last man out... We have already demonstrated repeatedly and publicly that the entirety of the military budget is being spent on bullshit that provides virtually zero protection from the real dangers of our world. Its time to tell the military, to forget about Jets, bombs, missiles, guns and troops and start talking about weapons that will allow us to stop a dirty bomb or backpack nuke. We've all seen how effective the military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq have been. Time to cut their budgets since they seem unable to spend it wisely.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
"Yuppies" have been replaced with "Douchebags".
The FICA trusts were all emptied by Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush. They no longer contain marketable securities, and instead contain IOUs with no economic value. Much as if you loaned yourself all the money in your 401k - the 401k still has an asset, worth the same as before, but it's useless to your retirement plans.
All spending by Social Security must come from taxation. Pre-Reagan, the SSA could actually sell the securities it held on the market, as they were normal federal bonds. That's no longer the case. The sad thing is, almost no one noticed. There was some complaining when the looting started, but we moved on the the next political scandal and ignored it for 20 years.
Unless you're proposing spending FICA withheld taxes on infrastructure?
Money is always fungible. Doesn't matter what the tax is called, the government will spent it where it wants.
BTW, FICA won't even cover the outlays it's intended for, going forward (the combined unfunded liabilities of SS and Medi* are $860k per taxpayer - never gonna happen). Breaking our promise there is only a matter of time (or we'll inflate our way out, but the promise isn't a dollar amount, it the ability to subsist on the money). And of course we lack the political courage to do this gracefully, 20 years ahead of a crisis.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That is very disingenuous, when you consider That of that 68%, more than half is money that people either earned by way of a pension, or already paid in in the form of social security. You have no right to "stop the handouts" when those moneys are in fact owed every bit as much as (if not more) than our vast public debt.
What can't be paid won't be paid. The public debt must be paid unless we amend or ignore the constitution, those "promises", not so much (per the SCOTUS). Local governments are already dealing with this, here and there, pre-saging the larger issue. They declare bankruptcy, and the smaller pension payouts come out of the settlement. We can't do that at the federal level - we'll either change the programs once there's a crisis (goodness knows we lack the courage to enable a soft landing by acting before a crisis), or inflate our way out, but either way the purchasing power won't be there. That's inevitable. The question is one of priorities - do we value mailing checks over roads? Education? A military? Enforcing important safety regulations? Something will have to give.
cut the military spending back to a sane level
15% of the budget isn't crazy. The military is already collapsing, and their current primary concern (and for the past decade or so) is how to manage the reduction in staff an equipment. Our post-WWII desire to be able to fight "2 and a half wars" is long one. It's already questionable whether we could fight one against a real opponent. You're focused on asymmetric threats, but the only reason we've had those and not world wars for 70 years is the deterrent effect of such a large military, an effect that is gone now.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Yes, that is always the problem. And the only way to reduce pork spending substantially is to reduce spending.
Good!
We can. But we don't. That's because every additional dollar we send to government is primarily used by politicians to buy votes.
In particular, the statement that People who like to claim that the government is incompetent are also the ones that cause it to be that way by not giving agencies enough resources to do their jobs. is wrong. In fact, the people who are shifting tax dollars away from infrastructure and into government handouts for voters are mostly identical to the people who are trying to use failing infrastructure to get yet more money from tax payers, money that still won't be spent on infrastructure.
Yes, that is always the problem. And the only way to reduce pork spending substantially is to reduce spending.
Or the legislators could actually demonstrate some of that fiscal responsibility they keep blathering about.
Good!
Truth comes out, you WANT them to be dysfunctional even if they have to be monkeywrencged to do it, so there's an excuse to get rid of them.
Or the legislators could actually demonstrate some of that fiscal responsibility they keep blathering about.
They can't. Seriously, it doesn't matter whether you're left or right, a crook or a saint, use private or public campaign funds, most of the money a legislator is going to spend is going to go to pork and most of the regulations he is going to pass is in the interest of crony capitalism. Trying to wish that away is like trying to wish gravity away when you're falling off a cliff.
Truth comes out, you WANT them to be dysfunctional even if they have to be monkeywrencged to do it, so there's an excuse to get rid of them.
You're confusing cause and effect. Regulatory agencies are by necessity going to be dysfunctional, and they are far too intrusive and powerful right now. If anything interferes with their operations right now, that's a net plus for society. There is a minimal role for regulatory agencies in government, but at a far lower level than today.
Or maybe... just maybe... governments will realize that these ICE manufacturers/dealerships have been peddling lies for years in search of the almighty dollar. Maybe the gov will start to break down this nonsensical business model and lower the barrier for entry to other competitors. This would allow Tesla to actually compete, and force other car manufacturers to play ball.
Dealerships had their place when the world was a much larger place and we couldn't converse with the other side of the world in seconds. Now there's almost no reason for a dealership, as we know it, to exist.
Or we could just keep the status quo, since nobody really like change anyway...
I have a 2001 Suzuki Vitara (2L/4cyl. Auto.) It is rated for 20/23 (city/highway) and I routinely get 22/25. I really wish they wouldn't have left the US market.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
The FICA trusts were all emptied by Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush. They no longer contain marketable securities, and instead contain IOUs with no economic value. Much as if you loaned yourself all the money in your 401k - the 401k still has an asset, worth the same as before, but it's useless to your retirement plans.
I've heard this claim pulled around quite a bit... It's patently false, though. They don't contain marketable securities, in the fact that they're special treasury bills- but they are valuable securities, regardless. As long as we continue to grow and pay taxes, those securities are as valuable as any other treasury security.
All spending by Social Security must come from taxation. Pre-Reagan, the SSA could actually sell the securities it held on the market, as they were normal federal bonds. That's no longer the case. The sad thing is, almost no one noticed. There was some complaining when the looting started, but we moved on the the next political scandal and ignored it for 20 years.
All spending by Social Security must come from taxation. I don't think we agree. FICA taxation.
Sure, the interest on the FICA trusts come from general taxation, but they're not the anywhere close to the majority of that income, and for now, at least, the trusts are solvent.
Money is always fungible. Doesn't matter what the tax is called, the government will spent it where it wants.
You're losing me. This isn't what happens. Not until the trusts are allowed to become insolvent.
BTW, FICA won't even cover the outlays it's intended for, going forward (the combined unfunded liabilities of SS and Medi* are $860k per taxpayer - never gonna happen). Breaking our promise there is only a matter of time (or we'll inflate our way out, but the promise isn't a dollar amount, it the ability to subsist on the money). And of course we lack the political courage to do this gracefully, 20 years ahead of a crisis.
Agreed- entirely. The trusts will not remain solvent perpetually. It is a problem that *must* be addressed... But conflating the future problem and what may be done about it as today's problem isn't really fair. The majority of your income taxes go to the military, flatly, period. FICA entitlements are their own set of problems right on the horizon, but today, we (well, this is subjective, I admit) get a lot more money out of those relatively small taxes per percentage of marginal rate than we do from income taxes, and a lot more value per dollar.
Crap. * I don't think we disagree
I'll grant that the FDA needs a cold reboot. The FTC needs a swift kick to get it moving. The FCC is a mixed bag, but it's recently been doing a bit better. The SEC needs actual funding and to actually do something to show they have teeth.
Of course, the FBI, CIA, and NSA also need a cold reboot. The DEA just needs the boot.
We do not need to remove regulation unless we want to go back to medicines with deadly poisons in them and our cities to go back to choking smog like Beijing and Shenzhen have.
They don't contain marketable securities, in the fact that they're special treasury bills- but they are valuable securities, regardless.
My point was just that SS claims can now only be paid from new taxation, whereas they used to be able to be paid by the fund selling securities. The government funded other operations by selling off those securities, just because they could get away with it.
All spending by Social Security must come from taxation. I don't think we agree. FICA taxation.
I'm not distinguishing by the label on the tax. Just the all outflows now require new inflows. If you check the usdebtclock.org page, you can see the totals, and the division between income tax, payroll tax, and corporate tax, but ultimately, congress can just change the law and spend the payroll tax on gold-plating the capitol if they want to.
he majority of your income taxes go to the military, flatly, period
Now that's just not true. Military spending is about 1/3 of income tax, and the government spends more than it makes.
today, we (well, this is subjective, I admit) get a lot more money out of those relatively small taxes per percentage of marginal rate than we do from income taxes, and a lot more value per dollar.
I'm not sure what your saying here, unless it's just to comment on your favorite flavor of government spending. Everyone has one, which is why cuts are so hard.
Personally I'm appalled at Social Security: so many people have no easy means of survival except at the pleasure of the government. I don't like that power balance at all. Some sort of government-regulated 401k-style thing, where the money is yours the whole time, would change the balance of power favorably for us all, while still providing a safety net. It would also mean the workers would, to some extent, directly own the means of production, which I'm a great fan of if it's not proxied through some government.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Something like the FDA might have made sense a century ago, when information was hard to get and insurance was largely unknown. These days, FDA functions are far better taken care of by private and voluntary mechanisms; the FDA has become a vehicle for massive crony capitalism and both holds back advances in medicine and contributes to out of control medical costs.
As for air pollution, if you have public cities, you end up having to have public regulation of air quality. But that's not the only mechanism either, and it's not a very good one. It would be far better if people actually got compensated for damage caused by air pollution and the polluters were made to pay.
As for air pollution, if you have public cities, you end up having to have public regulation of air quality. But that's not the only mechanism either, and it's not a very good one. It would be far better if people actually got compensated for damage caused by air pollution and the polluters were made to pay.
Yes, if the truth and justice fairy would wave her wand and cause the fair compensation to happen, that would be grand. But apparently corporate interests had her whacked over a century ago, so we need to do it ourselves. Given what court and lawyers cost these days and that the worst of the pollution tends to fall on the poorest citizens, that leaves a regulatory agency as the lest bad way to accomplish it.
Yes, which is why they created the EPA and similar regulatory agencies, which basically give them a license to pollute.
Many of these lawsuits would be class action lawsuits, so what "courts and lawyers cost" matters less and less. In fact, the US has been moving in that direction.
So if I get lung cancer I'll get a coupon for $0.50 off of a box of cough drops?
Right now, you get nothing if the EPA days the pollution was OK. Zip. Nada.
But that OK level is well below what we see in countries without environmental regulations. People in China also get Zip, Nada.
They get zip, nada, because their government says they should get zip, nada:
Environmental policy in China is set by the National People's Congress and managed by the Ministry of Environmental Protection. The Center for American Progress has described China's environmental policy as similar to that of the United States before 1970. That is, the central government issues fairly strict regulations, but the actual monitoring and enforcement is largely undertaken by local governments that have greater interest in economic growth. The environmental work of non-governmental forces, such as lawyers, journalists, and non-governmental organizations, is limited by government regulations.
It's primarily the work of non-governmental forces that has led to the environmental improvements in the US over the last half century. Now, in part, the EPA and other government agencies have responded to those pressures, but they have now ended up abusing their powers in different ways.
Let me repeat that again: China is what happens when you give government nearly absolute power to impose environmental policy.
Altogether, as I was saying the EPA is better than nothing, given our current system, but in absolute terms, it's an inefficient and poor way of protecting Americans from environmental problems.
Anyone who has driven an EVO already knows this. Especially the way I drive it. I prob get 10MPG. :p