Toyota's Hino Motors pleads guilty to US emissions fraud, fined $1.6 billion

By David Shepardson

(Reuters) -Hino Motors, a subsidiary of Japanese automaker Toyota, pleaded guilty on Wednesday over a multi-year emissions fraud scheme in the United States and must pay $1.6 billion in penalties, the U.S. Justice Department said.

U.S. District Court Judge Mark Goldsmith in Detroit accepted the Japanese truck and engine manufacturer's guilty plea and sentenced the company to pay a fine of $521.76 million and serve five years of probation during which it will be prohibited from importing diesel engines it manufactured into the United States.

The court also entered a $1.087 billion forfeiture money judgment against the company.

"Companies who intentionally evade our nation’s environmental laws, including by fabricating data to feign compliance with those laws, deserve punishment and will be held criminally accountable," said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's acting enforcement chief Jeffrey Hall.

Toyota declined to comment and Hino did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

In January, Hino said it would plead guilty over excess engine emissions in more than 105,000 U.S. vehicles in the United States from 2010 through 2022.

A company-commissioned panel said in 2022 Hino had falsified emissions data on some engines going back to at least 2003.

The settlement includes a mitigation program, valued at $155 million, to offset excess air emissions from the violations by replacing marine and locomotive engines, and a recall program, valued at $144.2 million, to fix engines in 2017-2019 heavy-duty trucks, the EPA said earlier.

Hino admitted that between 2010 and 2019, it used "illicit short-cuts" and submitted false applications for engine certification approvals and altered emission test data, conducted tests improperly and fabricated data without conducting any underlying tests.

Hino President Satoshi Ogiso said in January the company had improved its internal culture, oversight and compliance practices.

Hino said in January it booked an extraordinary loss of 230 billion yen, or about $1.54 billion, in its second quarter results in October to cover the expected litigation costs.

Over the last decade, several automakers admitted to selling vehicles with excess diesel emissions. Volkswagen paid more than $20 billion in fines, penalties and settlements after it admitted in 2015 it had cheated emissions tests by installing "defeat devices" and sophisticated software in nearly 11 million vehicles globally.

(Reporting by David Shepardson and Ryan Patrick Jones; Editing by Jamie Freed)