Seems Daihatsu has been a bunch of bad boys… for over 30 years…
The underlines are links to other articles on the subject.
A Japanese tiny-car manufacturer has halted production of its vehicles after admitting it had been forging safety tests for 30 years.
Toyota subsidiary Daihatsu, known for its miniature vehicles, halted factory operations on Tuesday after a report found that it had been forging the results of some safety tests since 1989.
The company had already paused shipments of all its vehicles, and will now shut down its four Japanese factories until at least the end of January.
It’s the latest development in a long-running saga surrounding the company’s safety record, with Daihatsu first acknowledging it had falsified some crash tests in April.
Full article HERE from Business Insider.
Daihatsu was/is known for making the VERY small trucks/cars in Japan, many licensed as Toyotas for world-wide sales. And they are now owned by Toyota.
That makes Toyota ‘suspect’ in their oversight of Daihatsu, and calls into question their own QA and crash test procedures. NOT a good place for them to be, especially with the Japanese consumers, much less the world-wide consumers.
Excellent blog, Thank You for it.
WTF?
Spam spam spam, lovely spam, wonderful spam….
“But I don’t like spam…”
Takata (the airbag company for US-produced Hondas and Toyotas) got roasted into bankruptcy when forensics revealed that managers had tried to conceal test data from the NHTSA investigators by deleting attachments (test data) off of certain engineers’ emails. Among the root causes was that faulty assembly in a particular plant in MX allowed moisture to enter and degrade the propellant chemicals, leading to erratic deflagration (and shooting metal shards that could slice open driver’s wrists.) One of the close-to-last straws was a finding that their management was proposing that if the defective products could be identified and quarantined, that they could inform the downstream vehicle OEMs and direct them to ship cars with the compromised airbags to dealers in arid states (!) to avoid moisture uptake (!)
I was a connector engineer at a supplier to one of Takata’s competitors, and with things like airbags, crash-protection systems, and missiles the fun challenge is designing in the space between mutually opposed constraints: The device has to work [a] DEPENDABLY, [b] possibly many years after its manufacture, [c] but just ONCE. Similar to designing WW2 gliders – which corners to you get to cut when it has to fly SAFELY, ONCE?
Yep, got spammed…again…sigh Guy- Excellent point, and yes guilty as charged!
The real question is, what is ‘too safe’?
I’d say that quite a while ago we reached the plateau of safety with cars, any increase in safety comes from too much and too expensive change for little result.
Are Daihatsu vehicles unsafe? Maybe, but under certain circumstances.
Unsafe vs a 1960’s car of the same size (some Euro vehicle)? Probably not.
Unsafe vs a 1940’s car, most likely not. Unsafe vs an 18 wheeler with a full trailer load? A Bradley IFV would come out scathed in that circumstance.
All these tests are rigged one way or another. Some are rigged for the government, some are rigged for the car company.
Still want a Ki pickup truck. Which our federal government has ruled unsafe at any speed (for new ones, but you can import old ones and those are just fine.) See? Rigged system.
Beans- You do have a point.
Daihatsu
I’ve always considered them to be the best built, reliable, low maintenance vehicles and was sad when they left the US market.
Like the new updated Toyota HiLux, for overseas sales only, base price $10K, $15K with antilock brakes and airbags.
Just waiting for your Ma Deuce mount or other accessories.
One of the problems is determining the harm caused. It seems that many of the issues are paperwork related because Daihatsu had a culture of don’t stop the assembly line and at various times they, for various reasons, didn’t have time to complete all the tests they were supposed to so they lied and said they did.
E.g.
In the certification process for the pole side collision tests of Daihatsu ROCKY HEVs and
Toyota RAIZE HEVs, it was necessary to conduct tests on the left and right sides and to submit
the test data. In July 2021, the passenger seat side (left) was tested in the presence of witnesses,
but the driver seat side (right) was not tested for a report, and there was no time or vehicle to
conduct the test again. Therefore, the person in charge of preparing the test report, believing
that there were no safety issues, submitted the result of the passenger seat side (left) test
conducted as an in-house test as the result of the driver seat side (right) test, so that the vehicles
would pass the certification test
And this one where almost certainly the test result means the car is better than the test
Although in the pedestrian head and leg protection test, the actual collision speed
exceeded the upper limit of the standard range specified by the regulations and the test
results under the relevant conditions could have been regarded as passing the test, the
person in charge of conducting the tests at the safety performance department considered
that the higher the collision speed, the more disadvantageous in the test, and that there was
no problem with the safety as long as passing the test under the test conditions less
favorable than those specified in the regulations, and therefore, to avoid the time to explain
to the examination body the reason the speed exceeded the upper limit of the standard range,
they stated a false collision speed on the test report to be within the standard range, and
applied for certification
(both from https://www.daihatsu.com/news/2023/report_1_E.pdf )
On the one hand, I think lying is bad, and that issues with organizational culture will cause real problems.
On the other hand, I’m not thinking of any organization that I would point to, and say that it has a functioning culture that I believe makes mainly good decisions. I’m perhaps cynical to have reservations about so many organizations.
Gripping hand? I am not exactly convinced that the regulators make sane achievable demands.
I am maybe not at the exact same preferred trade of safety versus cost in automobile design as Beans.
I think I may be in agreement with him about diminishing returns, and that some of the new ‘safety improvements’ may provide dubious real benefits in safety.
Design defects seem to be proportional to complexity. Prior to all the emissions and self-driving, retail automobiles already had a fair amount of mechanical complexity. Self driving especially added a bunch of electronic hardware and software complexity.
When I first put the bits together many years ago, I decided I did not want any responsibility for those design risks.
I’m not sure I can support any further conclusions on my end.
I’m thinking this is more of Toyota letting Daihatsu largely run itself and not looking at things as hard as they should have (periodic audits, checking in on management practices, etc). Now it’s biting them hard, a bad look for someone with the reputation and history of Toyota.
I really like the idea of a kei truck to get around town/to work. For something in a city I think they are a great option, especially for small businesses. Also a good option as a farm truck. Where vehicles like that fail is a situation where people have to get on a major road or highway to get around. I live on the edge of town and I’d eventually get run over or run off the road in anything that couldn’t reliably hit 60mph.
You can find videos of people here in the states that have kei trucks and find that with some mods you can get them to freeway speeds, although they do best on secondary roads. Being at least 25 y.o., they mostly have carbs, so mounting bigger carbs gets more power, and bigger, taller tires get a speed improvement, since gearing changes is more of a source problem. A turbo can help with power to run with the big dogs.
The kei vans already seem to have a better speed capability, but most of the AWD versions seem to lack the low gearing setups that the trucks can have for off road use. Check out Moto Cheez on u-tube for lots of info. He even shows how to convert a pickup to become a dump bed version. Very useful! His vids are informative and entertaining.
Some states allow them to be registered for street use, but the majority(?) don’t. Moto Cheez’s state doesn’t, but a neighboring state does.
Jay Bee
Kei trucks can do 60. They can’t do much more than that but 60 is achievable. Mind you they are much more happy doing 60-70km/h than 60-70mph but I’ve seen them hit the 60mph area on roads here in rural Japan.
They are however exactly the thing you want for an in-town/on farm run around and cost way way less than the EV that also fits that usecase