Mitsubishi Motors said it falsified fuel economy test data to make emissions levels look more favorable, and its shares slumped more than 15%, wiping $1.2 billion from its market value on Wednesday.
Tetsuro Aikawa, president of Japan’s Mitsubishi Motors, bowed in apology at a news conference in Tokyo after admitting the company falsified fuel economy test data to make emissions levels look more favorable. This scandal, the biggest since a defect cover-up more then a decade ago, has caused its shares to drop more than 15%, whipping clean 1.2 bilion dollars of its market value this Wednesday morning.
Mitsubishi Motors company shares lost more than 15%, causing the stock’s biggest one-day drop in almost 12 years.
Earlier scandals
Last scandal, in 2000, involved Mitsubishi Motors revealing that it covered up safety records and customer complaints. This included problems such as failing brakes, faulty clutches and fuel tanks that fell off vehicles.
Four years later it admitted to a larger problems going back decades and caused Japan’s worst automotive recall scandal at the time.
Manipulated cars
Test manipulation involved 625.000 vehicles produced since mid 2013. The vehicles were sold exclusively in Asia. These include ek Wagon and eK Space kei cars, which are also sold as the Nissan Dayz and Dayz Roox.
It was in fact Nissan who found the »cheat« as they Nissan discovered inconsistencies on the cars during their own testing. It is also worth noting that the vast majority, 468.000 cars, of the affected cars were sold by Nissan.
How did this cheat work?
It was a rather rudimentary bypass, as Mitsubishi engineers changed the way they measured miles per gallon in the lab.
So instead of going down the super sophisticated route chosen by Volkswagen, they simply over-inflated tires allowing them to get more miles per gallon out of the car when they tested the car on a rolling road, not unlike the dynos you know from tuning shops.
Pressure that high would of course cause the car to over-react in real world circumstances and would pose a hazard in daily driving.
Got to hand it out to Mitsubishi Motors though. It definitely took courage, or borderline insanity, to go ahead with this plan!
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