Daihatsu scandal

A recent independent investigation has come to light, bringing it up and down. As it turns out, Daihatsu (owned by Toyota) had falsified the results of its crash tests.

In fact, last April, Daihatsu admitted that in almost 90,000 of its cars, which were manufactured in Thailand and Malaysia and sold within 2022, it had lied about the safety offered.

However, according to the new research, the scandal is ultimately much bigger, as in the end results were not falsified for just 4 models that the company had initially admitted, but for 64.

Toyota has announced that it has detected a total of 174 new cases of irregularities in 64 models, and for this reason all shipments of Daihatsu vehicles around the world have been suspended. Toyota has announced that almost all models in the Daihatsu range may have been affected, with irregularities in the company’s safety tests dating back to 1989.

The main cause of concern initially centered around the performance of the air bag control units, with the units used in the test vehicles being different from those sold to the public. While the installed units were later found to comply with the regulations, further findings revealed that the inner lining of the front doors of some cars had been improperly modified for crash tests on some vehicles. This was done to prevent the section from breaking into sharp-edged pieces that could injure occupants when the side airbag deploys, which was not done on the models for sale.

The affected models were sold in various markets including Japan, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Gulf countries of Saudi Arabia. And we may have almost forgotten Daihatsu in Greece, but in Japan the company plays a leading role in Kei cars that favor urban micro-mobility.