94Ha ViewpointThe United States fined Toyota’s subsidiary Hino Motors more than $1.6 billion for “emission fraud”
On March 19, local time, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that a U.S. court accepted Hino Motors’ guilty plea to a single criminal charge, alleging that Hino Motors participated in a years-long criminal conspiracy to deceive the U.S. government and U.S. consumers and illegally smuggled goods into the United States. The court sentenced Toyota’s subsidiary Hino Motors to pay a criminal fine of $521.76 million and suspended its sentence for five years. During the probation period, it was prohibited to import any diesel engines produced by it into the United States and implement a comprehensive compliance and ethics program and reporting structure. The court also imposed a fine of $1.087 billion on the company.
Court records show that between 2010 and 2019, Hino Motors engineers submitted false engine certification applications in violation of the U.S. federal Clean Air Act. Hino Motors engineers often tampered with emissions test data, conducted tests in an improper manner, and fabricated data without conducting any basic tests. As a result of these fraudulent practices, Hino Motors imported and sold more than 105,000 substandard engines between 2010 and 2022. These engines were mainly installed in heavy-duty trucks manufactured and sold by Hino.
