The Subaru Corporation has admitted, following a report that revealed the company may have manipulated emissions and fuel economy data at one of its factories, that the scandal may be wider reaching than they initially thought. With initial estimates estimating a total number of affected vehicles at 903, it seems the final tally now sits at 1,551 affected cars.
That’s one thousand, five hundred and fifty one cars. A drop in the ocean compared to Volkswagen’s Dieselgate scandal.
However, Subaru’s not screwing around with this. They are deeply shamed by this matter, believed to have stemmed from a group of rogue managers a their production facility in Ota, of the Gunma Prefecture. As a result, president & CEO Yasuyuki Yoshinaga will step down from his roles, which will be filled by Tomomi Nakamura. Yoshinaga-san will remain with Subaru for the time being though, to handle the data manipulation scandal and right the ship.
Three motivations for the data manipulation were offered by Subaru. 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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