Mitsubishi Fuso to recall 450,000 more vehicles

Scandal-hit Mitsubishi Fuso Truck and Bus Corp will recall 450,000 more vehicles in Japan after an internal probe found further defects, a senior company official said Monday.
"We estimate the overall figure of affected vehicles - defined as those vehicles still in the market - to be approximately 450,000 units," senior executive officer Hideyuki Shiozawa told a news conference.
The figure comes on top of a recall of 180,000 trucks and buses announced last month, a company spokesman said.
"Those vehicles that have already been brought in for repairs will be brought in a second time," the spokesman said.
The announcement is the latest bombshell affecting the truck-maker, an affiliate of Mitsubishi Motors Corp, which is 37 percent owned by US-German auto giant DaimlerChrysler.
Mitsubishi Fuso said a probe going back to 1992 uncovered 43 cases where a recall was warranted and four more where an improvement campaign was called for, the company said.
It had yet to confirm its recall estimates with the transport ministry.
The judgement of its parent firm in not issuing recalls back in 2000 was "selective", "incomplete", and "in some cases, it even obviously ignored available information on quality and safety," Fuso chief executive Wilfried Porth said.
"I would first like to apologise... for the serious wrong-doings of our company in the past," he said.
It was unclear how many vehicles sent overseas would be affected, or how much it would hurt the bottom line, Porth said, but he added "the overall business impact will be, without doubt, significant."
Last week, Japanese police arrested a former president of Mitsubishi Motors and five other executives for covering-up defects, some of them fatal.
The arrests marked a further blow to parent Mitsubishi, the nation's fourth largest carmaker, whose sales and stock price have plummeted due to the repeated, belated recalls and cover-up scandals.
Mitsubishi Fuso was spun off from Mitsubishi Motors in 2003.
The truck-maker also said Monday 15 top executives would voluntarily take pay cuts, including 50 percent cuts for Porth and his chairman, with the funds to be given to the "Foundation for Orphans from Automobile Accidents."
Sales of parent Mitsubishi's vehicles in May plunged 56.3 percent to 4,213, apparently hit by the cover-up scandals. The fall is much steeper than the 10.6 percent year-on-year drop in overall new vehicle sales in Japan.
The auto-maker forecast in May that it would post sales in the year to March 2005 of 2.25 trillion yen, a recurring loss of 150 billion yen and a net loss of 230 billion yen, but reports said sales drops would force it to downgrade its outlook.