Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/06/06/toyota-lied-about-safety-certifications.html
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They caught the Boing disease
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“Yes, we faked the safety data, but those cars are safe. Trust us.”
If you made up the reported results of testing, then how do you know the cars are safe? Did you actually run the tests but then fake the data? That makes no sense unless the actual test data showed the cars were NOT safe. The remaining option, that you didn’t run the tests means you can’t know that the cars are safe.
Sorry, but no. I don’t trust you.
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It sounds like someone did a little too much continuous improvement while eliminating waste in the crash test protocol…
Or there’s an unpublished annex to ‘the Toyota Way’ where MBA-Clausewitz informs us that fraud is a mere continuation of regulatory compliance by other means.
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This has become a really common refrain in corporate scandals in Japan. They usually say, “Of course we did safety checks! Just not the standard safety checks as required by law…”
A lot of the time, they use terms like “converted data,” as though their own tests are just as good.
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And this is why independent testing, ideally by (or at least contracted by) the governmental agency, is necessary. Self-certification will always lead to results that serve self-interest.
I believe here in the US the NHTSA does its own testing, and I know for sure the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety does independent testing. That said, I don’t know if all case are required to be independently tested to be put on the road, which could still leave a loophole like the one exploited in Japan. But at least here in the US there is some degree of independent testing going on.
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The big Japanese corporations are as corrupt as anywhere else but sometimes manage to hide it for longer. Olympus was hit with over a half-billion dollars in fines in 2011 for falsifying financial data for 2 decades.
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One of the key tenets of late-stage capitalism.
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