Japanese officials have raided an office of
Mitsubishi Motors following the revelation that the carmaker had falsified its
fuel economy data.
The officials searched its plant in the
central Japanese city of Okazaki.
Mitsubishi has admitted that employees
altered data to flatter mileage rates on more than 600,000 vehicles.
A government spokesman said they were
treating it as an "extremely serious case" and that it had ordered
the company to submit a full report.
The authorities have set 27 April as the
deadline for Mitsubishi Motors to hand over the report on the inaccurate
testing.
Japan's chief cabinet secretary,
Yoshihide Suga, said: "Based on [the findings from] the raid, and a report
from the company, we would like to reveal the extent of the inaccuracies as
soon as possible.
"We will deal with the situation in
a strict manner and would like to make sure of the safety of cars."
The raided office is the company's
second largest plant in Japan and is a manufacturing hub as well as a research
facility.
Akira Kishimoto, an auto analyst at
JPMorgan told Reuters that he estimated the falsification could cost Mitsubishi
more than 50bn yen ($450m; £313.8m), including payments to consumers, the costs
of replacing parts and compensation to Nissan.
The inaccurate tests involved 157,000 of
its own cars and 468,000 vehicles produced for Nissan.
The issue affected models including
Mitsubishi's ek Wagon and eK Space, as well as Nissan's Dayz and Dayz Roox.
All are "mini-cars" with 660cc
petrol engines and are popular in Japan but have found little success in other
markets.
Mitsubishi fuel test furore
More than
600,000
Japanese vehicles affected
·
157,000 Mitsubishi models
·
468,000 Nissan models
·
15% Wednesday's share price fall
Source:
Mitsubishi Motors
Reuters
Analysis:
Karishma Vaswani, BBC Asia business correspondent
The troubles at Mitsubishi Motors are
likely to get much worse now that the government has weighed in.
Japan's transport ministry investigators
have raided the research centre of the car-maker's Nagoya plant, presumably to
find out how these fuel-efficiency tests were falsified, and how much bigger
the problem might be.
The government says that Mitsubishi has
broken the trust of consumers and that it expects a report from the car-firm in
the next week.
Estimates for how much this scandal will
cost Mitsubishi are thought to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars - but
the real damage will be to the company's brand, still reeling from a defects
scandal in the early 2000s.
Shares
impact
Shares of Mitsubishi Motors were not
traded on Thursday as no buyers could be found to match investors wanting to
sell.
Instead, the Tokyo Stock Exchange set an
indicated closing price of 583 yen, a 20% drop from Wednesday's close of 733
yen.
Shares in Mitsubishi had already fallen
15% on Wednesday, when news of the falsified data first emerged.
Scandals
This is the first time that a Japanese
car maker has reported misconduct involving fuel economy tests.
Mitsubishi had struggled for years to
regain consumer trust after a defects scandal in the early 2000s that covered
up problems such as failing brakes, faulty clutches and fuel tanks that fell
off vehicles.
In 2014 South Korean car makers Hyundai
and its affiliate, Kia, agreed to pay $350m in US penalties for overstating
their vehicles' fuel economy ratings. They also resolved claims from car
owners.
Mitsubishi's announcement follows on
from the Volkswagen's emissions scandal last year, in which it was found to
have cheated diesel emissions tests in the United States and elsewhere.
VW is recalling millions of cars
worldwide as a result of the scandal and has set aside €6.7bn (£4.8bn) to cover
costs.
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