Mitsubishi says that the company was cheating on Japanese fuel economy tests back in 1991. An independent panel of investigators was hire in order to get to the bottom of what happened, they'll have three months for preparing a report about the deception.
Mitsubishi's cheat consists of the way it calculated driving resistance to determinate fuel economy. According to its statement the company had engineers that were using their own high-speed coasting test to establish the driving resistance. Even if in 2007 the company has decided to use the country's mandated evaluation the workers were still utilizing the high-speed test in the field. Employees have only selected low values for driving resistance from the results, to make fuel economy look better.
The report that Mitsubishi presented to Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism contains these details: "We are currently investigating the reasoning behind each of the decisions," the company said in a statement. Prosecutors got also hired, they'll try to find out why this happened for such a long time, the investigation might discover many other transgressions. The scandal started when Nissan discovered some fuel economy discrepancies in its Mitsubishi-made tinykei-class cars in Japan. The company admitted the problem of 625.000 vehicles from the country and that they might have an incorrect mileage.
