[HN Gopher] Toyota-owned automaker tampered with safety tests fo...
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Toyota-owned automaker tampered with safety tests for 30 years
Author : tmalsburg2
Score : 57 points
Date : 2023-12-29 19:27 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| mertbio wrote:
| I recently read that another Toyoto-owned brand Suzuki is selling
| rusty cars in Turkey. It is sad to see a brand like Toyota is
| associated with a lot of misdoings.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Toyota owns less than 5% of Suzuki.
| neilv wrote:
| How does that go on for over 30 years without anyone notifying
| corporate or regulators?
|
| Or did people speak up, but the pattern wasn't stopped (until it
| had been going on for 30 years)?
| pas wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| phonon wrote:
| "tests on the airbags of Daihatsu Move/Subaru Stella,
| Daihatsu Cast/Toyota Pixis Joy, Daihatsu Gran Max/Toyota Town
| Ace/Mazda Bongo revealed the irregularity that the "airbags
| deployment computer (ECU)" was not the same as that of mass-
| produced products."
|
| https://www.daihatsu.com/news/2023/20231220-4.html
| neilv wrote:
| Wikipedia:
|
| > _[Daihatsu] has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Toyota
| Motor Corporation since August 2016._
|
| Did a good company accidentally acquire a company with a very
| serious secret problem?
| dharmab wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| The question is how much control Toyota had over operational
| decisions. I'd say not too much, even with Daihatsu being a
| subsidiary of Toyota.
|
| Either way, Daihatsu cheating and lying to pass safety tests
| for 30 years is bad, and hints at a deep seated culture
| issue.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Lite version: https://lite.cnn.com/2023/12/27/business/daihatsu-
| japan-prod...
| br0wnr1c3 wrote:
| 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.
| ahazred8ta wrote:
| fwiw, https://text.npr.org/ -
| https://old.reddit.com/r/news/new/
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _Toyota 's Daihatsu to halt all vehicle shipments as safety
| scandal widens_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38756044 -
| Dec 2023 (61 comments)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| They also just had a real safety recall requiring manual
| inspection of over a million vehicles.
|
| This, along with their resistance to EVs is going to bite them.
| bbarnett wrote:
| Resistance to EVs?! They are pioneers!
| antiframe wrote:
| Pioneers yet I still can't buy a Toyota EV.
| robin_reala wrote:
| You can buy a bZ4X. I'm not sure why you'd want to, but you
| can.
|
| https://www.toyota.com/bz4x/
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Why not? They are for sale in Norway:
| https://www.toyota.no/nybil/bz4x
|
| Are they not sold where you are?
| userbinator wrote:
| ...and no one really cared? Maybe that's the real takeaway here.
|
| After all, I'm not sure those who are looking for the safest car
| would put Toyota near the top of their lists anyway. Volvo comes
| to mind instead.
| charles_f wrote:
| > Toyota-owned automaker
|
| This is a bit of a weasel-ish, click-bait title. 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.
|
| Maybe Toyota has their hands dirty, I don't know, and I'd love to
| know. As it is, that's bordering a little on the wrong side of
| journalistic integrity.
| giarc wrote:
| So probably better would be "Daihatsu, maker of Toyota
| vehicles, tampered with safety tests for 30 years"
| csande17 wrote:
| > 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.
| woodruffw wrote:
| > 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.
| freetime2 wrote:
| I recently ordered a new car from Daihatsu, and they called and
| asked if I still want the car or would like to cancel the order
| in light of this news.
|
| I'm honestly not that concerned about the safety of the vehicle.
| They've been cheating on safety tests for a long time apparently,
| and in the real world I don't think Daihatsu cars have fared much
| worse than other manufacturers in crashes. It's also got a lot
| more safety tech than the car it is replacing, so I think it
| would be a step up in safety regardless.
|
| Instead I'm more just concerned with the future of the company,
| whether the resale value of the car will drop, etc. I also do
| find the scale of this fraud pretty shocking, and don't want to
| reward this behavior by purchasing from them.
|
| So probably I will cancel and buy a Honda or Suzuki instead.
| csours wrote:
| 1967: Toyota became a "major shareholder" of Daihatsu
|
| 1995: Toyota ownership increased from 16.8% -> 33.4%
|
| 1998: 51.2%
|
| 2016: 100%
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daihatsu#:~:text=Daihatsu%20wa....
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(page generated 2023-12-29 23:01 UTC)