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Mitsubishi: We've Been Cheating On Fuel Tests For 25 years (cnn.com)

Posted by msmash on from the driving-bad-examples dept.

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.

9 of 195 comments (clear)

  1. Somebody... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...will be committing sudoku over this.

    1. Re:Somebody... by istartedi · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yeah, it's pretty sad. Everything has aligned, and the numbers add up. They're boxed in.

      --
      For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
  2. Not for lack of trying by dadelbunts · · Score: 4, Funny

    Mitsubishi execs later clarified that they tried to sell said cars in the U.S, but no one bought any.

  3. Why admit? by w.hamra1987 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Why admit? by cloud.pt · · Score: 4, Interesting

      in Japan they got this bad habit of spewing it all out when the shit first hits the fan. It's some sort of "first-fail atonement", deeply instilled in their culture, which in my humble opinion, is better practice than elsewhere. When you do the "bad thing", odds to get caught are around the sub-10% as you take measures to hide it, but by the time you get caught, odds are you're gonna get caught so they sky-rocket to 99%+ for all other instances of the event that can be analyzed. So why really trust in that meager, uncontrollable 1% that will keep sinking you when you can just apologize for all past, present and future instances of the event? Better just to spit it all out since the milk has already been spilled than have that corrosive loss of confidence haunt you forever. It's actually the best damage control you can do. Nothing like what Volkswagen is doing to be honest - VW won't admit the problem likely exists in other models before 2009. They are also just "patching" really awfully the problem, with a patch that suits emission policy, but that surreptitiously harms the consumer by reducing original power/economy spec, which made the consumer buy the product. It's like they are swiping all the dirt under the rug with the worst possible mop they had lying around, and that rug is already bulgy with previous dirt they hope will stay covered.

  4. Re:What's happening? by ooloorie · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Are all car companies trying to look worst than their competitors? "Oh, you think they're bad? Check out what we did!"

    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.

  5. Thanks, Dicks by pablo_max · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  6. Just a wild guess... by Locke2005 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.
  7. It's those rogue engineers again! by kimgkimg · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The two rogue engineers should definitely get a sternly worded reprimand letter put in the permanent files now...