According to Reuters, an independent committee has investigated Daihatsu after the brand admitted in April that they had manipulated side-impact safety tests conducted on 88,000 compact cars, most of which were sold under the Toyota name.
Toyota announced the decision to suspend the shipment of all Daihatsu batches in a press conference on December 20. Furthermore, a press release issued by Toyota confirmed that the investigating committee also suspects that Daihatsu may have tampered with environmental performance data.
The latest revelations show that the scope of the scandal is much larger than initially estimated and could have an impact on the reputation of car manufacturers in terms of quality and safety.
Daihatsu is Toyota’s small car manufacturing brand and produces some popular keicar models in the Japanese market. The safety scandal also affects certain models from Mazda and Subaru sold in the domestic market, as well as some Toyota and Daihatsu models in foreign markets.
According to Toyota’s data, Daihatsu has produced 1.1 million vehicles in the first 10 months of the year, with nearly 40% of them being sold in foreign markets. Daihatsu has sold approximately 660,000 vehicles worldwide during that time period, accounting for 7% of Toyota’s sales volume.
Toyota stated that the affected models on December 20 include vehicles for Southeast Asian markets such as Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Vietnam, as well as countries in Central and South America such as Mexico, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Uruguay…
Trang Nguyen (forum.autodaily.vn)