Volkswagen Group Japan KK, the Japanese wing of Volkswagen AG, said Wednesday it had found more than 80 cases of wrongly recorded exhaust emission and fuel economy data for newly made cars since 2012.
The Japanese arm of the German automaker said that out of 1,113 sample inspections carried out on new vehicles between 2012 to 2018, 83 of the vehicles inspected showed that employees had recorded incorrect data as being valid.
The malpractice by the employees conducting the tests was in violation of rules related to Japan's test conditions for speed and humidity.
President and CEO of Volkswagen Group Japan, Till Scheer, said at a press briefing on the matter in Tokyo that the wrongly recorded data, which affected 14 of the maker's models manufactured for the Japanese market, were a result of human error.
Volkswagen Group Japan, for its part, said there were no safety issues as other tests carried out on the new vehicles were conducted in line with standard protocols.
The group also said it would upgrade its system to automatically invalidate test results that do not meet Japanese regulatory standards.
Following data manipulation scandals by other automakers including Nissan and Subaru, Volkswagen Group Japan reported the cases to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism on Tuesday.
This is following an order by the ministry in July for automakers here to carry out in-house inspections of shop floor data practices, following the widely publicized data manipulation breaches by Nissan and Subaru.
Last year saw a slew of scandals related to Japanese manufacturers, including Kobe Steel and subsidiaries of Mitsubishi Materials Corp.
They were found to have falsified quality data for products used in multiple industries, including in equipment used by Japan's Self-Defense Forces (SDF), which compounded growing concerns about quality control and corporate governance in Japan's manufacturing sector.
Final inspections that were routinely carried out on vehicles at Nissan and Subaru by unqualified staff led to extensive recalls by the automakers.
