Mitsubishi admits employees falsified fuel economy tests data

Shares in Mitsubishi Motors were down up to 16 per cent on Wednesday morning

Mitsubishi is Japan's largest car maker

Mitsubishi has said it is has found evidence that employees have manipulated fuel economy data for four types of vehicle.

More than 150,000 Mitsubishi light passenger cars and 468,000 vehicles produced for Nissan are involved in inaccurate testing, the company said.

Tetsuro Aikawa, Mitsubishi president, said that the misconduct had been reported to the transportation ministry.

The names of the affected models are the Mitsubishi ek Wagon and ek Space, and the Nissan Dayz and Dayz Roox.

The false data was discovered when Nissan pointed out inconsistencies in the ways that vehicles had been tested. Mitsubishi then conducted an investigation and found the data had been falsified.

In the testing process, cars are hooked up to a dynamo which acts like a treadmill and monitors their emissions.

The dynamo includes settings to simulate real-world conditions like wind resistance. These were not set correctly, Mitsubishi said.

Shares in Mitsubishi Motors were down up to 16 per cent on Wednesday morning in anticipation of the announcement.

Mitsubishi is Japan's largest car maker. It sold more than one million vehicles last year but has less than 1 per cent of the UK market.

This is the first time a Japanese car maker has been implicated in a vehicle testing scandal since the emissions scandal engulfed Volkswagen last year.

Mitsubishi's admission of falsifying data is different to Volkswagen's because it relates to petrol-powered cars, while VW cheated in emissions tests on diesel models.

The VW scandal that broke on September 18 last year was initially confined to 500,000 cars but escalated to involve 11 million vehicles.

VW has reached an agreement with EU regulators on how to handle the fix for affected cars. A deal with US regulators is yet to be agreed.

Volkswagen is in the process of recalling millions of cars and has set aside £4.8 billion to cover costs. In October, Volkswagen posted its first quarterly loss for 15 years of €2.5 billion.