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Toyota-owned automaker tampered with safety tests for 30 years
- mertbio 3y agoI 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 3y agoToyota owns less than 5% of Suzuki.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- neilv 3y agoHow 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 3y agoJapan 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 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.
- wolverine876 3y agoDo you have experience (or expertise) with Japanese culture? > So, probably they kept quiet on the first failed test, made it go away to save face, and then there was no going back. That is an essential lesson of integrity: Lie now and you may end up telling the same lie every day going forward.
- pas 3y agoNot directly. I'm basing it on the similar Kobe Steel aluminum and copper scandal and report. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43298649 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-43298649
- theoekejjjbdej 3y ago[flagged]
- SoftTalker 3y agoFrom 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 3y ago"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 https://www.daihatsu.com/news/2023/20231220-4.html
- SoftTalker 3y agoBut what does that mean? Was it a prototype because the production model wasn't ready yet? Was it hand-built as opposed to "mass produced" but presumed and intended to be functionally identical, or was it intentionally different for the purpose of passing the test, knowing that the actual computer would not?
- numpad0 3y agoThey built ceritifcation specials to pass tests. Which means the devices under test were not representative of mass produced examples. Specifically they flashed some custom ROM on a airbag computer so it auto-deploys at scheduled T+ time from the beginning of a test run. That's kind of a huge deal because we wouldn't know if airbag is going to deploy in real crashes. Other tampering includes ignoring requirement that crashes must also unlock front doors, reporting numbers from a note hidden in palm while the test is running instead of from gauges, so on and so forth.
- neilv 3y agoWikipedia: > [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 3y agoToyota 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 3y agoThe 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.
- to11mtm 3y ago> 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. It could go either way, IMO. It didn't take long for folks to the Toyotafication of Subaru's as Toyota's ownership increased. In general it doesn't take a lot of ownership for a carmaker to start getting some pressure.
- numpad0 3y agoDaihatsu CEO right now is ex Toyota regional CTO for APAC, so there's that. One of contributing factors, as being told in news narratives, is Daihatsu relied on shortened time to market and therefore reduced engineering man-hours as a cost saving measure, and there were barely enough time for scheduled tests, let alone for delaying ones affected by known issues, which had incentivized test engineers to just rig the test and/or forge documents. Toyota is also known for persistently demanding suppliers to contribute towards $20-30MM yearly cost saving target by reducing price by 1% every half years(~100MM and 5.85% every 3 years). That surely had contributed, and frankly that itself is a culture issue.
- SoftTalker 3y agoLite version: https://lite.cnn.com/2023/12/27/business/daihatsu-japan-production-halt-safety-tests-intl-hnk/index.html https://lite.cnn.com/2023/12/27/business/daihatsu-japan-prod...
- br0wnr1c3 3y agounrelated, 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 3y agofwiw, https://text.npr.org/ https://text.npr.org/ - https://old.reddit.com/r/news/new/ https://old.reddit.com/r/news/new/
- hilux 3y agoIt seems to be a version without advertising, i.e. without revenue for the provider. I share your desire for such sites, but I'm surprised they exist.
- dang 3y agoRecent and related: Toyota's Daihatsu to halt all vehicle shipments as safety scandal widens - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38756044 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38756044 - Dec 2023 (61 comments)
- mensetmanusman 3y agoThey 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.
- b112 3y agoResistance to EVs?! They are pioneers!
- antiframe 3y agoPioneers yet I still can't buy a Toyota EV.
- robin_reala 3y agoYou can buy a bZ4X. I’m not sure why you’d want to, but you can. https://www.toyota.com/bz4x/ https://www.toyota.com/bz4x/
- antiframe 3y agoOh that fair. I didn't realize they made one now. When I last looked they just had hybrids. I was looking for a car not truck though, so I may have glossed over it then too.
- kwhitefoot 3y agoWhy not? They are for sale in Norway: https://www.toyota.no/nybil/bz4x https://www.toyota.no/nybil/bz4x Are they not sold where you are?
- b112 3y agoThere are long wait lists for some EVs these days, certain models, in some countries. I know of people who had to wait more than a year.
- userbinator 3y ago...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.
- bamboozled 3y agoI 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.
- toast0 3y agoMy impression is that kei cars have all the crash safety of a motorcycle.
- bamboozled 3y agoYup, they’re cheap and light (fuel efficient), so they are popular
- wolverine876 3y agoWhat 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.
- numpad0 3y agoNobody outside Japan would care because it's a separate company and a domestic brand. You probably haven't heard of Daihatsu Tanto or Mira.
- hilux 3y agoA few years ago I visited the Toyota showroom/museum in Odaiba, near Tokyo. All of their model names (for cars and vans sold in Japan) look like English speling misteaks. It was absolutely hilarious.
- charles_f 3y ago> 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 3y agoSo probably better would be "Daihatsu, maker of Toyota vehicles, tampered with safety tests for 30 years"
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- TheCapeGreek 3y agoDaihatsu is its own brand.
- cwillu 3y agoThat was my impression, but apparently they're also sold with a Toyota badge on them, which somewhat changes my feelings on the matter.
- giarc 3y agoThe report here (https://www.daihatsu.com/news/2023/report_1_E.pdf https://www.daihatsu.com/news/2023/report_1_E.pdf) lists Toyota Yaris, Toyota RAIZE HEV, Toyota Agya, Toyota Pixis Joy, Toyota Pixis Truck, Toyota Roomy, and Toyota Tank all affected.
- csande17 3y ago> 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.
- freetime2 3y agoI 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.
- wolverine876 3y ago> 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.
- freetime2 3y agoDaihatsu is the market leader for kei car sales in Japan (where I live), with 560,000 cars sold in 2022. The model that I ordered is frequently the top-selling car model in the country in a given month. They are involved in accidents all the time. If there were issues with e.g. the airbag failing to deploy properly in real-world crashes (one of the areas where they cheated), I believe that would have surfaced by now.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y agoThis is one of those casers where statistics aren't your friend. The statistics don't matter if your child dies because your vehicle is one of those that wouldn't have passed the safety tests. If they're fudging to pass safety tests, then there's most definitely people whose lives have been affected by it.
- csours 3y ago1967: 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%20was%20an%20independent%20automaker,Sanwa%20Bank%2C%20banker%20of%20Daihatsu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daihatsu#:~:text=Daihatsu%20wa....
- csours 3y agoGoodhart's Law, applied. It's easy to copy and paste: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" In application Goodhart's Law means that you must also use another measure that more closely matches the desired result. In this instance, that means that we should also be looking for injuries per X. Where X may be vehicles sold, distance travelled per vehicle, or per person-vehicle, per time, or some other per capita number. As far as I am aware, numbers like this are not easily available or comparable.
- bbqbbqbbq 3y agoPer 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.
- maximus-decimus 3y agoI 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.
- two_handfuls 3y agoBetween that and the emissions cheating (VW & others), it shows our safety standards enforcement is not as good as it should be. Not because cheating exists and they are caught, but because it lasted so long before being caught.
- GuB-42 3y agoI 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.
- ngneer 3y agoYou make a good point. How to induce people to do the right thing? The carrot? The stick? Having a checklist? Inculcating a safety culture? All of the above? If you are cheating, then typically you know you are cheating. I am going to assume these people knew, even if Toyota at large did not.
- kats 3y agohttps://www.daihatsu.com/news/2023/20230428-4.html https://www.daihatsu.com/news/2023/20230428-4.html > Daihatsu has confirmed that in the side collision tests of the [Toyota Yaris, Perodua Axia, and Toyota Agya], the inside lining of the front seat door was improperly modified, and that there was a violation of the side collision test procedures and methods stipulated by regulations. Inside lining of the front seat door? That doesn't sound very significant at all.
- kats 3y agodidn'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 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.
- smogcutter 3y agoIt’s clearly something, or it wouldn’t cheat the test.
- fwungy 3y agoIt assumes the regulations are sensible which is not always the case. Regulations can cause inordinate costs increases relative to their actual value. The fact that the regulations may be well intended is orthogonal. There is no reason to cheat if compliance is trivial.
- Arn_Thor 3y agoThat is one argument. But the company doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt
- alphabettsy 3y agoThis is the kind of thing I worry about since finding out the IIHS allow automakers to do their own testing and get certification by providing the data. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/about-our-tests#verification https://www.iihs.org/ratings/about-our-tests#verification IIHS is non-government but they have more rigorous standards than the government and they’re what I would rely on evaluating a vehicle.
- LanzVonL 3y agoYou can punish car companies by buying used. It's much more sensible on your pocketbook too. And if your used vehicle's old enough, the automaker won't track your driving, in-car conversations, cell phone use, etc. Really the only possible downside is reliability but a full rebuild for engine and tranny is probably, at most, a sixth the cost of a new car.
- stbenjam 3y agoWhat car is doing something with in-car conversations other than looking for a wake word? This is mostly FUD.
- LanzVonL 3y agoI'm sure the government(s) have their own wake words too. Also how would anybody know? At this point you should assume anything with a mic is spying on you, because you're right. We long since left behind trust.
- callalex 3y agoOne example that made the rounds recently after a Consumer Rwports…report was Honda’s privacy policy which explicitly states they can do whatever they want with the contents of your text messages, including analyzing them a d selling them.
- usr1106 3y agoIntel tampered with information security for 30 years? Yes, they (or at least some of them) had known that speculative execution causes security problems. But no, they have not been in business that long with technology that could be affected. And more importantly the whole industry is too young to have any security regulations. Very much like the car industry in the 1930s had nothing comparable to today's safety regulations.