Stiff internal regulations may have played a role.
Japanese carmaker Subaru has admitted to manipulating fuel consumption and emissions data of its vehicles following an investigation ordered by the Japanese government, it has been reported.
The company has stated that “certain measurements and data were inappropriately altered” when cars rolling out of the Gunma and Yajima plants in Japan were undergoing final inspections. Subaru confirms knowledge of 903 cars built between December 2012 and November 2017 were affected. However, they also said that they couldn’t locate data from measurement equipment from before 2012, and they say there is a “high probability that such manipulation commenced around 2002.”
While many will jump the gun and draw parallels between Subaru and Volkswagen’s Dieselgate scandal, one key difference is how the data manipulation occurred and how high-up the scandal goes. Where Volkswagen had high-level executives fully-aware of their developed defeat device, Subaru’s fudging only goes as far as the data from the factory floor. Inspectors and foremen on the production line are under the spotlight, with “managers at, or above the section-chief level and executive managers were not aware of alterations.”
Three motivations for buggering the data were offered by the company. They suspect that senior inspectors may have ordered their subordinates to simply adjust the fuel consumption and emissions vehicles for sample cars that fell short, which then demanded screwing with data from cars that were perfectly OK in order to reduce “variance in measurement values, in order to avoid questions from group chiefs and the section chief on such variance.”
The third possible motivation would be a lack of training, and a lack of stringent internal rules. Legally, companies are permitted to alter measurement values (to a specific extent) to account for malfunctioning or erroneous equipment. They say that inspectors that might’ve misunderstood this allowance might have been manipulating data further than the specified wiggle-room because they didn’t know there were limits to said wiggle-room.
Subaru claims that their internal quality control standards are higher than what is required of them, to ensure the unlikelihood of recalls. However, they admit that this issue is an “extremely serious compliance problem,” and has offered its “deepest apologies for the significant trouble and inconvenience caused to customers, partners, and all other stakeholders.”
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