It also manipulated the equipment used to measure a car’s rolling resistance during fuel economy tests and used a different testing system from other Japanese carmakers.
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The falsified tests involved 157,000 Mitsubishi eK Wagon and eK Space 660cc mini-cars, some 468,000 of which have been supplied to Nissan Motors since 2011.
Mitsubishi said it would stop making and selling those cars, and has set up an independent panel to investigate the issue.
The raid by officials came after the company admitted that employees had altered the data in fuel economy tests to give better scores to 600,000 vehicles.
It said it had no plans to change its relationship with Mitsubishi Motors for now.
“We immediately brought the discrepancy to the attention of Mitsubishi as they are responsible for the development and homologation of the current vehicles”.
“We found that with respect to the fuel consumption testing data…”
Company president Tetsuro Aikawa told the reporters in a press conference that what the staff had done was intentional, and the act of falsification of data was true. Mitsubishi was producing vehicles for its fellow Japanese manufacturer and it was Nissan that uncovered the problem.
Mitsubishi’s shares plunged 15 percent in the Japanese stock market following the announcement, putting its market value at $6.6 billion.
Other auto companies have previously been caught out overstating their vehicles’ fuel efficiency.
Mitsubishi Motors’ domestic sales fell 18 per cent a year ago to 102,010 units, the fourth consecutive annual decline.
After Volkswagen with its diesel engines, and Nokian with its tires, it’s now Mitsubishi’s turn to plead guilty to cheating in fuel economy tests for four of its models, Automotive News reports. The former also said that Mitsubishi had admitted to them that their data had been intentionally falsified.
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Prior to that in 2014, South Korea’s Hyundai and Kia agreed to pay tens of millions of dollars in fine to settle a litigation in the USA, again for exaggerating the fuel efficiency on its cars sold in 2012 and 2013.
