The transport ministry conducted an on-site inspection on Thursday at a Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. plant in Kobe regarding ship engine data tampering by the company. Three ministry officials entered the plant around 9:40 a.m., and the raid, based on the marine pollution prevention law, will continue on Friday.
Kawasaki Heavy, a major Japanese heavy machinery maker, announced on Wednesday that fuel economy data had been falsified during test operations for 673 out of 674 ship engines manufactured since January 2000. The irregularities were discovered as Kawasaki Heavy checked the engines for nitrogen oxide emissions following a request from the ministry that covered not only their company but also many other industry peers.
To keep emissions data within permissible ranges of customer specifications and reduce data variance, Kawasaki Heavy inappropriately adjusted testing equipment. The wrongdoing may have affected nitrogen oxide emissions from these engines. As a result, Kawasaki Heavy plans to investigate whether actual emissions exceeded regulations and whether data falsification occurred for engines built before 2000. They also intend to establish a special committee consisting of external experts to determine the cause of this misconduct and develop measures to prevent its recurrence.
Following revelations of fuel economy data falsification for ship engines at an IHI Corp subsidiary and two units of Hitachi Zosen Corp., last month, the transport ministry urged 19 other ship engine manufacturers, including Kawasaki Heavy, to investigate possible tampering with their own data.
On Wednesday, IHI released the results of its investigation into its subsidiary’s data tampering. They revised up the number of affected engines built since 2003 from 4,905 to 4,918 and identified an additional 1,913 engines with altered data between December 1974 and 2002.