Japan’s transport ministry has told Mitsubishi Motors it must conduct vehicle recalls more quickly after discovering multiple problems in past cases, on the same day that the carmaker filed for another recall.
Reuters reported that the ministry, which investigated MMC in December, concluded that the carmaker delayed for two years seeking the cause of an oil leak problem that led to a series of four recalls between 2010 and 2012 of 1.76m vehicles, including the Minica and Minicab.
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MMC has been embroiled in a number of recall-related scandals, most notably in 2000 when an insider’s tip revealed that it had been hiding customer complaints for over two decades.
“It became clear that Mitsubishi had problems in each of the steps related to vehicle recalls,” Takahiro Ikari, an official at the transport ministry, told a Mitsubishi Motors executive.
“The company should come up with plans for improvement, implement them and report them to the ministry.”
The ministry found seven new problems related to the 2010-2012 recalls, which included not responding quickly to problems reported by dealerships and inappropriate explanations given to the ministry, though none of them were illegal, an official told Reuters.
