Due to testing violations and other issues, on 26 December, Toyota's subsidiary Daihatsu Industries announced that its headquarters plant in Ikeda City, Osaka Prefecture, stopped operating. As a result, all four of the company's vehicle plants in Japan have ceased production. The shutdown is expected to last until at least the end of January 2024. In the meantime, Daihatsu has suspended shipments of all models and is currently under investigation by Japan's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism.
Violations lasted 34 years
Daihatsu, which was founded in 1907 and is known for its popular micro-small cars in Japan and Southeast Asia, is understood to have been acquired by Toyota for 51.2 per cent of its shares in 1998 and became a wholly-owned subsidiary of Toyota in 2016. In April this year, Daihatsu received an internal report of crash test violations, and a preliminary investigation was conducted after which it was confirmed that the report was true, and that four of its models developed for overseas markets had violated the regulations in side impact tests. As a result, Daihatsu set up a new independent third-party committee to conduct further investigations based on the internal investigations, and in May, two more models were found to be in violation of the crash test. Later, as the investigation progressed, more violations were revealed.
On 20 December, Daihatsu announced on its website that it would suspend shipments of all models, including those already in production, after the third-party committee found 174 irregularities in the company's review and monitoring, including falsification of safety crash test data. The number of models confirmed to be involved in the irregularities has incr
