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Suzuki CEO steps down due to fuel economy scandal

Osamu Suzuki will step down from the position of CEO of Suzuki, at the end of this month, in the wake of the company's fuel economy calculation scandal.


The 86-year-old Suzuki will however retain his role as chairman of the company that bears his adopted family's name. Executive vice president Osamu Honda will also step down on June 29 at the company's annual general meeting.

A replacement CEO and executive vice president have not yet been named.

In addition to the two resignations, Suzuki announced that it will cut bonuses and pay for top executives and managers at the automaker. Directors will forgo their bonuses for the 2015 financial year, while managing officers will have theirs cut in half.


Above: Osamu Suzuki planting a tree at Suzuki's UK HQ.

Osamu Suzuki will also have his pay reduced by 40 percent for the next six months, with smaller reductions for less senior officers. Suzuki's auditors and senior managers will be docked 10 percent of their pay over the next three months.

The company will take unspecified "disciplinary measures" against people within the engineering and certification departments. In addition, Suzuki will step up training, internal checks and balances, "promote utilisation of the whistle-blowing system", and consolidate its testing facilities.

Back on May 18, the company publicly admitted that it had used an improper and illegal testing procedure to calculate its fuel economy numbers for cars sold in Japan. For the country's coasting test, Suzuki used rolling resistance data that was constructed from “measured data of individual components such as tyres, brakes and transmission” rather than direct measurement.

It's said that 14 Suzuki-badged vehicles, as well as 12 cars made by Suzuki but sold by other Japanese car makers, had their fuel economy numbers calculated improperly. Suzuki has stated that “the issue does not apply to our products sold outside Japan”.

After re-calculating its domestic fuel economy numbers via the government-approved method, Suzuki found that “all certified [fuel economy] values remained within the range of measurement deviation”.


Above: Suzuki Vitara.

Japanese car makers were forced by the government to reconfirm their fuel economy figures after Mitsubishi was found, in late April, to have doctored its fuel consumption figures on two of its kei car models.

After subsequent revelations that domestic market vehicles as far back as 1991 had dodgy fuel economy numbers, Nissan purchased a controlling 30 percent stake in the car maker.

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