While NHTSA was looking for smoke signals on the horizon and people were getting injured or killed......
+ 1,700 death and injury claims....AND WHERE WAS NHTSA?
Honda in Japan Distances Itself From Fine on U.S. Subsidiary
TOKYO — A record $70 million fine imposed on Honda Motor by safety regulators in the United States was being treated in Japan like a mildly intriguing piece of foreign news: an American problem for what has become, in many ways, a highly American company.
Call it a paradox of globalization. Japanese carmakers’ businesses — and Honda’s in particular — are now so widely dispersed around the world that to many, their overseas subsidiaries can look like semiautonomous colonies. Located far away, they seem almost to operate under unique rules intended for their local habitats.
It is a structure that Honda emphasized on Friday as it sought to distance its Japanese headquarters from the fallout of the fine, the largest ever imposed on an automaker by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Honda has admitted what is the basis for the fine — that it grossly underreported serious accidents involving its cars to the United States government for more than a decade.
The agreement between the automaker and agency over the civil penalty, which was signed on Dec. 29, named not only American Honda Motor Company but also “all its parent and subsidiary companies.” That has not stopped the compartmentalizing, however.
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“This is above all an issue between American Honda Motor Company and the U.S. authorities,” said a spokesman for the parent corporation in Tokyo, Ben Nakamura. A representative of Honda’s American subsidiary said in an email that the fine had been levied against and would be paid by the business in the United States.
Keeping Honda’s American problems at arm’s length could be made easier by the company’s status as perhaps the most American of Japan’s carmakers. It earns more than half of its revenue in North America and was the first Japanese automaker to establish a production base in the United States — a motorcycle factory in Marysville, Ohio, which opened in 1979.
So many more plants have followed that in its most recent fiscal year, which ended in March 2014, Honda built more cars and light trucks in the United States and Canada than it sold there — another first for a Japanese company. The surplus was exported, mostly to Mexico.
Yet, for all the American experience accumulated by Honda and other Japanese manufacturers, the United States can still seem like a hostile environment.
Many involved in Japan’s car industry, as well as Japanese citizens, believe the American authorities treat Japanese automakers more harshly than they do their American rivals. It is a view that hardened during Toyota’s recall crisis five years ago, which occurred at a low point for Toyota’s competitors in the United States, with General Motors and Chrysler having experienced bankruptcy and government rescues.
Toyota eventually paid $1.2 billion to settle a criminal investigation by the Justice Department related to defect reporting. In a four-year inquiry, the department found that the company concealed information about defects from consumers and the government, risking lives because of faulty parts that could cause sudden, unintended acceleration in several vehicle models. Some in Japan nevertheless saw the unprecedented penalty as unjustly sev
The Honda fine could deepen the perception of unfairness. It was twice the size of a penalty levied by the highway safety agency against G.M. last year over its delayed response to ignition switch defects linked to at least 13 deaths.
Fearing a backlash, Japanese auto executives are reluctant to publicly criticize the authorities in the United States. But in private, some have expressed dismay over what they see as overheated rhetoric from American politicians and the dangers of America’s litigious culture. The conservative Sankei newspaper, picking up on the theme, said last month that it saw “hints of Japan-bashing” in the furor over dangerous airbags made by the Japanese parts supplier Takata.
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“Just like with Toyota’s large-scale U.S. recall issue, there may be a dynamic that is trying to weaken Japan, which is increasing its presence in the global automobile industry,” it said.
Honda’s contention that its reporting problems are limited to the United States is backed by government safety regulators in Japan. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, which is responsible for automobile safety in Japan, said it had found no evidence that Honda underreported defects or accidents in Japan. The ministry did not comment on the appropriateness of the Honda fine.
In some previous cases, it has vocally defended Japanese producers: During a recall of millions of Takata-made seatbelt buckles in 1996, officials in Tokyo said similar seatbelt problems were rare in Japan, and suggested that American drivers were experiencing trouble because they kept their vehicles dirtier than their fastidious Japanese counterparts.
Honda disclosed in November that it had failed to report almost two-thirds of the about 2,600 notices of injuries or deaths in the United States that it obtained from mid-2003 through mid-2014. A spokesman for the ministry, Masato Sahashi, said that it did not publish numbers on equivalent reports in Japan but that Honda’s numbers were not “noticeably smaller than those of other carmakers.”
Honda said the problems in the United States resulted partly from a misinterpretation of American rules governing what sort of accidents required reporting to the transportation safety agency.
American Honda Motor created its own automated reporting system that was not in line with agency standards, but that has since been fixed, said Mr. Nakamura, the Honda spokesman. That system was not used in other markets.
Correction: January 9, 2015
An earlier version of this article misstated the month in which Honda’s fiscal year ended. It was in March, not April.
An earlier version of this article misstated the month in which Honda’s fiscal year ended. It was in March, not April.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/10/business/honda-in-japan-distances-itself-from-us-subsidiary-after-record-fine.html?_r=1
