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Toyota president apologises following cheating scandal

NEWS STORY
09/12/2003

At a time when Toyota F1 employee Angelo Santini is being investigated in respect of claims of industrial espionage, it's worth noting that Toyota president Fujio Cho has had to apologise publicly after the Japanese car manufacturer was forced to admit helping several thousand of its mechanics cheat in a state mechanics exam.

Toyota officials were asked by the Japanese transport ministry to set questions for the notoriously difficult automobile engineering exam. Thirty-eight of the fifty questions that comprise the exam were set by Toyota whose staff then posted them on an internal website along with a number of 'practice' questions, marking the 38 'suggested' questions with an asterisk.

Last year 9,000 aspiring engineers took the exam with only 300 passing, this year almost half of the 7,300 that sat the exam worked for Toyota.

It's understood that staff from 240 of Toyota's 308 participating dealers accessed the website ahead of the examination.

"This incident betrays consumers' trust in Toyota," Mr Cho told a special press conference.

He went on to confirm that his staff will retake the test. Meanwhile the transport ministry is deciding what action to take.

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