Toyota halts deliveries and production due to safety test fraud

In recent years, Toyota has seemed in the eyes of car enthusiasts to be a company that can do no wrong with its remarkable commitment to producing high-performance cars and its extensive involvement in motorsports. However, in the eyes of the Japanese government, it turns out that the company can certainly do wrong, as it has been forced to stop deliveries and production of a number of cars due to falsified data during safety tests.

This is the latest development in a scandal that rocked Daihatsu, now wholly owned by Toyota, late last year when the company halted production for a month over similar incidents. As the BBC reported, there was little evidence to suggest that the cars being sold were unsafe. Rather, the problem was that the cars being tested for safety were fitted with different components to those being sold in order to keep production running at full speed.

Toyota Corolla Fielder

It now appears that the problem was bigger than initially thought. Toyota itself is implicated in the scandal, as is Mazda, in which Toyota holds a 5.1 percent stake, and traditional rival Honda. According to the BBC, Honda has explicitly stated that its tests of engine noise and performance, not safety, were based on manipulated results. An unspecified, discontinued Suzuki model is also said to be implicated in the scandal.

Toyota has found that six models were affected by falsified safety tests, three of which are no longer in production. Production of the three models still on sale – the Corolla Fielder and Corolla Axio, which are not sold in Europe, and the Yaris Cross, which is sold in Europe – has been halted. It was also found that test results on the engine performance of the previous generation Lexus RX were misrepresented.

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