Police raided Mitsubishi Motors’ headquarters in Tokyo and other places on Friday as part of an investigation into an accident in which a Mitsubishi wheel killed a housewife and injured two children, the car maker told Dow Jones.
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Police told the news agency that, in the January 2002 accident, 29-year-old housewife Shiho Okamoto was killed and her two sons injured when a tyre from a Mitsubishi truck hit them as they walked along a footpath in the city of Yokohama, near Tokyo.
Professional negligence was suspected and investigators found that the hub, which links the axle to the tyre, was broken, the report said, noting that Mitsubishi has said faulty checks led to the accident which could have been avoided if the bolts were tightened properly.
Dow Jones noted that, shortly after the accident, however, Mitsubishi Motors began offering free inspections of the trucks, affecting 78,000 vehicles – Mitsubishi Fuso Truck & Bus Corp., the vehicle maker’s truck and bus unit, said in a statement it has changed the parts on more than 73,000 vehicles.
Mitsubishi Motors said it spun off its truck and bus division to Mitsubishi Fuso in January 2003 and said it will cooperate with the police investigation, the report added.
According to Dow Jones, Mitsubishi Fuso also said on Friday that 50 cases of tyres falling off Mitsubishi trucks have been reported, but there had been no more reports of injuries or damages.
The news agency noted that Mitsubishi Motors was embroiled in a scandal involving a massive cover-up of vehicle defects spanning decades that surfaced three years ago, and recalled 800,000 vehicles and later recalled a million more, with most vehicles in the first recall needing more repairs.
Since then, Mitsubishi Motors has been trying to clean up its image under its partnership with DaimlerChrysler but its car sales in Japan have struggled because of an impression about quality problems, Dow Jones added.
