Toyota-owned automaker tampered with safety tests for 30 years

> in the real world I don’t think Daihatsu cars have fared much worse than other manufacturers in crashes

It's almost impossible to know that without data, given the frequency of crashes involving Daihatsu cars (at least in the US), and the visibility of crashes generally - we don't know about 99.x% of them.

I would also check insurance if those rates aren't going to skyrocket.

And what about governmental regulation? Knowingly driving a car that doesn't meet the safety regulation, in my opinion, should be banned.

Just like people who put a quick-release steering wheel in their car and then get rear-ended. Sure they didn't make a mistake, but because of their own choice they exacerbated the problem.

Unbelievable, they called just after a couple of days? Does honest business (although after the fact) still exist?

The emission cheaters are still years after being caught trying not to take their responsibilities against all end customers they caused damage.

Suzuki is not better. They knowingly sell cars with rusted seats: https://twitter.com/EmrahAslanPADRE/status/17392971833193350...

unrelated, but can every news site please build a lite version? This opened so fast and was so easy to read. I forgot how nice websites could be with HTML plus some mild CSS.

I think it is hard to find a balance between enforcement, realism and stringency.

If you make enforcement hard and standards stringent, with no realism, you will get cars that are optimized to pass a test that doesn't help in practice.

If you make enforcement hard and tests that are realistic but too easy, you will get an improvement, but maybe not as good as it may be.

And if you loosen up on enforcement and make test that are both realistic and stringent, manufacturers will cheat.

If you make all three hard, you just shift the problem, manufacturers will either optimize for tests, do not enough, or cheat depending on what is the balance between the three.

It’s clearly something, or it wouldn’t cheat the test.

Is the inside lining more likely to sever my femoral artery now in a side impact?

These are almost always significant things, at the very least worth looking into.

didn't notice before, but the CNN article has a link to a PDF report that gives a lot more details.

https://www.daihatsu.com/news/2023/report_1_E.pdf

Here's the longer description of the same thing. It sure sounds more serious.

> When applying for certification of side collision tests for vehicles developed by Daihatsu for overseas markets (four models), the person in charge of conducting the tests, concerned that it would be problematic if the development and sales schedule was not met due to the failure of the certification tests, made manual modifications on the certified prototype vehicles that differed from those of mass-produced vehicles, such as cutting the back of the plastic front door trims to prevent sharp edges in the event of a collision, in order to ensure that the vehicles would pass the certification tests.

So probably better would be "Daihatsu, maker of Toyota vehicles, tampered with safety tests for 30 years"

> The scandal is another blow to the automaker, which had admitted in April to violating standards on crash tests on more than 88,000 cars, mostly sold under the Toyota brand in countries such as Malaysia and Thailand.

Seems fair to mention Toyota in the headline, since that was the brand name people thought they were buying when they got one of these cars.

> Calling it Daihatsu would not generate the same outrage, so they try to virtually inflate the scale of the scandal to a major car manufacturer.

I think this is probably because most news readers don't know the name Daihatsu, not because they're trying to inflate the scandal.

They've had a majority ownership for 25 years and their own internal controls failed to catch this on cars that are being sold as Toyota's.

Seems plenty fair to me.

When you own a company, you're responsible for that company's actions. There's no "maybe" about it. Daihatsu is Toyota.

You'd have more of a point if the acquisition had happened this year, but Toyota took majority ownership in 1998.

I thought it was clickbait too, until I realized it was Daihatsu, which is all but unknown in the US where CNN is based. But then I realized that "Toyota-owned automaker Daihatsu tampered..." would work and now I think it's clickbait again.

What car is doing something with in-car conversations other than looking for a wake word? This is mostly FUD.

Toyota has been a major shareholder of Daihatsu since the late 60s, with veto power since the mid-90s and majority ownership since the late 90s.

It’s clear that the problems started long before Toyota had whole or even majority ownership.

Even from dealing with acquisitions at much smaller scales in the tech industry, I was surprised at how frequently we encountered small companies bending the rules or outright flouting the law. Discovering blatant legal or safety violations would have ended the acquisition talks, but these problems are often so deeply embedded in the company that you simply can’t expose everything during due diligence. These problems may have been baked into processes and common knowledge among a small group of people who were more interested in making their own jobs easier and maintaining their position of power than in adhering to the law. They might have had an “everyone does it” attitude after coming from other companies they also broke the law. Once it starts and they don’t have any consequences for a couple years, it becomes the de facto standard in the company. And because it doesn’t show up on a balance sheet or in any of the auditable documentation, it takes a very long time for someone to raise the issue and possibly risk their job in the process.

At one point we talked to some people who had been breaking a regulatory law for years and they genuinely had no idea. They had just been doing things the way they learned at another company and thought it was all above board.

With the benefits of ownership come everything else. If Toyota didn't know about this issue, that's a major failure of Toyota management. If they did know, it's more of a failure.

I don’t think anyone cares for the reasons you state.

In Japan they produce mostly kei cars, these are 3 cylinder tin cans on wheels. No one even assumes they’re “safe”. The brakes work fine and that’s about it.

Once we needed a safer car we sold it.

What makes you say that nobody cared?

People love to glamorize and empower corruption, for some reason. That is something people care about and act on, in all cultures, at all times.

Nobody outside Japan would care because it's a separate company and a domestic brand. You probably haven't heard of Daihatsu Tanto or Mira.

Per accident, normalized over velocity and angle of impact is ideal I'd assume in order to not bias on the kind of driving done in vehicles of a given brand.

I don't think Goodhart's law applies here. They weren't really "cheating" to get better metrics, they just seemed to be taking shortcuts out of laziness.

Japan has a strong culture of "don't rock the boat, be sure, very very sure if you accuse someone", and thus accusations are already sentences practically. Couple this with any kind of loyalty, and you immediately see that speaking up will get folks excommunicated (ronins, woah!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRn4xzaugbk

So, probably they kept quiet on the first failed test, made it go away to save face, and then there was no going back.

From reading through some of the reports linked in the CNN article, it sounds like in a lot of cases the test employee was taking shortcuts such as reporting results from the left side of the vehicle as results from the right side of the vehicle under the belief that there was no substantive difference, or not properly adjusting the tire pressure before the test and reporting that it had been adjusted.

It still illustrates that this sort of stuff was either tolerated or not detected, but in all honestly it sounds (to me) like a lot of it was pretty minor stuff. It's not like the car exploded in a raging fireball on the test stand and the reported result was "A++ would buy" like Ford did with the Pinto.

Resistance to EVs?! They are pioneers!

Toyota owns less than 5% of Suzuki.