"China Economic Weekly" reporter Lv Jiangtao | Beijing report
For a long time, most people's impression of Japanese cars is that they are fuel-efficient and durable, and Japanese cars have therefore gained a higher premium in the market.
However, in recent years, many Japanese car companies and auto parts companies have successively exposed fraud incidents, and people have also doubted the quality of Japanese cars.
Many netizens have ridiculed Japan's proud craftsman spirit as "the spirit of bowing and craftsmanship" after seeing the heads of Japanese companies bowing and apologizing after the fraud scandal was exposed.
Recently, the Japanese auto industry once again exposed a fraud scandal. The protagonist of the incident is Hino Motors, a subsidiary of Toyota Motor Group.
Hino Motors said on August 22 that one of the company's light-duty engine models also failed to meet emission test requirements and would suspend the Dutro Delivery of a series of small trucks.
Combined with this disclosure, the total number of car engines that Hino has falsified data on reaches 643,635, and more than 60,000 of these engines need to be recalled.
Hino Motors has been cheating for nearly 20 years
Founded in 1942, Hino Motors has a history of 80 years. It is the largest commercial vehicle manufacturer in Japan, mainly producing trucks and buses. In 2021, the global sales volume will reach 155,000, of which the domestic sales in Japan will be 60,000.
In August 2001, Hino Motors was controlled by Toyota Motor, and Toyota held 50.1% of Hino's shares.
Although Hino and Toyota remain independent in terms of brands and operations, Toyota, as the company's largest shareholder, has actual control.
At the beginning of March this year, Hino Motor's exhaust gas fraud scandal was exposed. The company violated regulations including engine exhaust emissions and fuel consumption data, and submitted a false test report to the Japanese Ministry of Transport.
At that time, the findings released by Hino admitted that starting in 2016, it had falsified data on emissions and fuel performance of four engines, involving 117,000 vehicles.
Since then, Hino Motors has announced a recall of nearly 47,000 vehicles produced between April 2017 and March this year, and established an investigation committee.
In early August this year, Hino Motors announced the results of the investigation.
The results showed that Hino's improper behavior included engine exhaust emission-related violations, fuel consumption data-related violations, and the submission of false reports when Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism investigated exhaust emissions and fuel consumption data in 2016.
Among them, Hino Motors' violations related to exhaust emissions began at least around 2003, which is nearly 20 years ago.
The number of engines involved has also increased from 4 to 26, and the affected vehicles have expanded from the previously disclosed 117,000 to 567,000.
And a further 20,900 related cars will be recalled.
According to Hino, the test results were falsified because the team developing the engine knew they would not meet their targets and felt stressed.
However, things are far from over.
On August 22, Hino Motors once again announced that violations were found in the engine test of its small truck "Hino Dutro", involving 76,000 vehicles sold after 2019. This is also the third time that Hino Motors has found violations.
So far, the total number of Hino vehicles involved in the emissions fraud scandal has exceeded 640,000.
Affected by this news, Hino Motor's stock price fell 10% on August 23, becoming the largest decliner in the Nikkei index, and its parent company Toyota Motor's stock price also fell 2.6% that day.
According to Reuters news, on August 24, as the Hino Motors engine data fraud scandal continued to ferment, Toyota Motor Corporation announced on August 24 that it had expelled Hino Motors from the Toyota-led commercial vehicle cooperation.
Relevant information shows that Toyota, Hino and Isuzu Motors reached a partnership in April 2021 to establish a joint venture Commercial Partnership Technology Company (CJPT), which aims to promote the technology development of commercial vehicles.
Suzuki Motor and Daihatsu Industries also joined in July of the same year.
Toyota 'very hurt'
In addition to facing recalls and penalties after the fraud scandal was exposed, Hino will also have to deal with potential losses from class action lawsuits.
According to news previously released by Hino Motors, four US companies sued Hino Motors and its US subsidiary, as well as Hino Motors' parent company Toyota, to the US court on the grounds of damage caused by Hino Motors' engine data fraud, and demanded Pay more than $5 million in damages.
According to foreign media reports, it was after the discovery of engine data fraud in North America that Hino Motors expanded the scope of the investigation to Japan, thus unveiling the scandal of data fraud for nearly 20 years.
As the parent company of Hino Motors, in addition to the damage to its reputation, Toyota's production will also be affected. Since some models of Toyota and Isuzu are equipped with Hino Motors' problem engines, the production of related models of these two car companies has to be suspended. .
Regarding the continuous upgrade of Hino's counterfeiting door, Toyota's head Akio Toyoda publicly stated recently: "Hino has once again failed to live up to the expectations and trust of shareholders, and we are very disappointed by this."
Akio Toyoda's statement put all the responsibility on Hino Motors, but according to Japanese media reports, some Japanese securities analysts believe that Toyota Motor, the controlling shareholder with 50.1% stake in Hino Motors, obviously needs to take part of the responsibility for this. function in recovery.
Because Toyota is responsible for Hino's corporate culture, after Hino became a Toyota subsidiary in 2001, almost all Hino presidents were born in Toyota.
It is worth noting that in the past two years, Toyota has been implicated more than once because of the fraudulent behavior of its subsidiaries.
At the beginning of 2021, the Japanese auto parts giant Akebono Brake Industry Co., Ltd. exposed a scandal of fraudulent quality inspection data, and Toyota is the largest shareholder of Akebono Brake.
In June of the same year, the Kanto Transportation Bureau of Japan’s Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism found that Toyota’s Lexus dealers had falsified inspection items such as headlight brightness and front tire angle for 565 Lexus models. Apologize to the outside world.
Japanese cars "fall off the altar"?
The frequent fraud incidents in recent years have plunged the Japanese auto manufacturing industry, once famous for its "craftsman spirit", into an unprecedented crisis of trust.
In May of this year, Japan's Mitsubishi Electric admitted that the monitoring data of transformers for power plants were falsified, with a time span of at least 30 years.
And Mitsubishi Motors shocked the world as early as 2016 because of the falsification of fuel consumption data.
At that time, Mitsubishi Motors admitted that, in order to obtain tax incentives, it had been using illegal experimental methods to measure fuel efficiency data since 1991, and tampered with the data when necessary to make the fuel efficiency data beautify by 5% to 10%.
Also in 2016, Suzuki Motor's 26 models used different methods to detect fuel consumption than those stipulated by the state. When testing again, it was found that the fuel consumption was higher than the registered data, involving a total of 16 models and 2.1 million vehicles.
In 2017, Subaru was exposed to the "quality inspection door", and another Japanese auto giant Nissan Motor revealed the "quality inspection door" four times in more than a year.
In addition, Mazda, Suzuki, Yamaha and other car companies have also been exposed in 2018 to have fraudulent exhaust emissions and fuel consumption tests.
In addition to vehicle manufacturers, Japan's auto parts and raw material suppliers are also the hardest hit areas for counterfeiting.
In 2015, the airbags produced by Japan's Takata Company were exposed to tampering with key product testing data for more than ten years; in 2017, the "Kobe Steel Works Fake Door" shocked the world; in 2021, Hitachi Metals admitted that the quality inspection data fraud has existed for at least 30 years... …
In recent years, due to the frequent occurrence of counterfeiting incidents, many Japanese companies frequently "bow an apology", admitting problems such as counterfeiting and quality defects.
The figure of the executives who frequently "bow and apologize" in front of the camera is even dubbed "the spirit of bowing" by some netizens, which also casts a thick shadow on the quality myth of Japanese cars.
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