You may have got echoes of this over the ether these past few days, but Mitsubishi motors has followed Volkswagen in revealing that it too had, gasp, falsified its emission figures for its cars.
And not to be out done by the Germans, the company admitted today that it had been at it for nigh on quarter of a century. Yep, since 1991, the mileage figures touted by Mitsubishi for all those millions of sold Pajeros, Shoguns, Lancers, Outlanders, etc. were as believable as the Easter Bunny.
In fact, the company had been manipulating the numbers for so long that they went from being 'falsified' to 'accepted company practice'. This, according to the Japan Times, is how the President of Mitsubishi Motors (pictured above) explained the remarkable longevity of the company's malfeasance:
“We are not sure if they were even aware that it was the wrong method. When it started, they might have thought it was correct, and that thought was then passed down, so it is possible that they did it without questioning why”.
This is a classic Japanese answer to a typical Japanese problem - 'the tyranny of tradition' as I like to call it. We've always done it like this so why should we change it, even if the method is shamelessly wrong/illegal.
Or rather, mind-blowingly, expensively illegal. For the four most recent car models affected (sold domestically since 2012), the financial damage to the company is estimated to top 100 billion yen. And the accountants can't get their heads around the last 25 years and the millions of cars sold worldwide because, like, man, those, numbers, are like, just, like, cosmically freaking big, man.
I'm glad to be driving a Mazda, but we are thinking about (gasp!) changing cars to something a tad bigger and right now, if you think about it, there may be no better time to buy a ... Mitsubishi.
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