Kawasaki Heavy Becomes Embroiled In Growing Japanese Engine Scandal

A third Japanese company has come clean that it altered test results for hundreds of ship engines manufactured since the year 2000.

Kawasaki Heavy Industries joins IHI Power Systems and Hitachi Zosen in a rumbling Japanese engine scandal as Tokyo investigates all the nation’s ship engine manufacturers.

Following the news this April that more than 4,000 ship engines manufactured by IHI Power Systems had falsified fuel economy data over the past 20 years, the Japanese government vowed to investigate all engine manufacturers.

Hitachi Zosen was forced to apologise to customers around the world after two of its subsidiaries were found to have falsified fuel economy data for a total of 1,364 ship engines, or almost all of the units investigated, that had been shipped out since 1999. The falsifications may have impacted calculations for nitrogen oxide emissions.

Now Kawasaki Heavy Industries is having to follow suit, admitting this week that test results were altered for 673 of its two-stroke diesel engines as well as one four-stroke engine.

“Specifically, the investigation confirmed that shop trial fuel consumption rates for the company’s marine diesel engines had been altered through the manipulation of testing equipment to keep values within the permissible range of customer specifications and to reduce data discrepancies. This has the potential to impact NOx emissions calculations for these engines,” the company wrote in a statement. 

Investigations underway in Japan have overtones of the famous Volkswagen emissions scandal. 

The 2015 Volkswagen emissions scandal is the most famous recent example of manufacturers knowingly misleading customers. The German car manufacturer was found to have intentionally programmed turbocharged direct injection (TDI) diesel engines to activate their emissions controls only during laboratory emissions testing, which caused the vehicles’ NOx output to meet US standards during regulatory testing. However, the vehicles emitted up to 40 times more NOx in real-world driving.

Shipping has had previous engine scandals. MAN, itself a subsidiary of Volkswagen, paid a fine in 2011 over its misleading fuel consumption claims while in 2016, Wärtsilä revealed deviations in certain fuel consumption measurement tests were detected at Wärtsilä’s delivery centre in Trieste in Italy.