Crane recalls in Japan

Over the past four years more than 22,000 Japanese rough terrain and all terrain cranes have been recalled by their manufacturers. The scale of these recalls is without parallel or precedent in the entire history of the mobile crane business worldwide. However, considering the vast number of cranes involved, the impact on the Japanese manufacturers, measured in cost or reputation, has been surprisingly modest. One can only imagine the gigantic cost, on all levels, had similar events occurred in North America. The scope and cost of the product changes demanded, the consequential damages and law suits, the media outcry, would potentially have been so significant that it could well have bankrupted the manufacturers involved.

The mass crane recalls began in the summer of 2004, shortly after several major product recall scandals involving truck and bus manufacturer Mitsubishi Fuso (formerly a major supplier of truck crane carriers). The scandal persuaded the Japanese government to change the national law to stamp out the culture of concealment and deception that had pervaded the manufacturer by tightening the laws governing product recalls.

The Japanese government’s increased focus upon customer complaints and disclosure by manufacturers of product problems has had a radical effect upon many of the nation’s manufacturers, and especially in the nation’s highly vaunted vehicle and machinery industries.

The story of recalls in Japan opens a window into the historically cozy relationship between government and industry and particularly the tight connections involving the supremely powerful industrial conglomerates—the so-called keiretsu—in the world’s second largest industrial producer.

Scandal breaks

A key event came in 2002 when a 29-year-old woman was killed and her two children injured in Yokohama by a flying truck tyre. The tyre flew off a Mitsubishi Fuso truck. It later came to light that there had been some 50 similar accidents dating back to 1992, blamed by the vehicle manufacturer upon improper maintenance by users that wore down the bolts. When the woman’s family filed charges against Mitsubishi Motors and Mitsubishi Fuso, the manufacturer began voluntarily replacing wheel hubs but continued to blame the fatal accident on improper bolt tightening by the truck owner.

Police raided Mitsubishi Fuso in October 2003 and January 2004. As a result it came to light that, following the 1992 accident, Mitsubishi made some design changes and even internally coined a word to describe the condition when the wheel falls off: wagiri, or ‘cutting slices’. Following another similar accident in June 1994, documents revealed that senior officials of Mitsubishi’s bus and truck development head office had held internal meetings to discuss wheels, hubs, bolts and nuts. They showed that a Mitsubishi Fuso domestic truck dealer had warned the manufacturer about the problem after an accident in October 2000. In January 2002, Mitsubishi inspected Fuso trucks and offered free replacements but excluded buses, claiming to the Transport Ministry that buses do not run at high speed and therefore that there wasn’t enough force to cause serious risks.

In May 2002, Mitsubishi had conducted a test of 500 of its trucks, and 30% of them were found to have cracks in the hubs. Still, in July 2002, Mitsubishi submitted a report to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport blaming the accidents on poor maintenance and not mentioning its recent test program or the results. In March 2003, the Mitsubishi engineer responsible for testing the endurance of critical parts issued an internal report again stating that cracks in the hub were due to poor maintenance.

Meanwhile, in October 2002, a 39-year-old trucker died in an accident involving a Mitsubishi Fuso truck, blamed on a faulty clutch. It was later discovered that similar clutch problems had been involved in some 70 accidents and that Mitsubishi had never filed reports to the ministry, as demanded by Japanese law.

Finally, in March 2004, Mitsubishi admitted to the ministry of land, infrastructure and transport that the wheel hubs were defective because of a material processing weakness. In May seven former executives, including former Mitsubishi Fuso chairman Takashi Usami, were arrested on suspicions of falsifying truck defect reports. They denied the accusations, but later three, including Usami, were charged for the cover-up. That year the firm's vehicle sales plummeted by 60%.

This scandal came only four years after a similar crisis when Mitsubishi was found to have concealed some 64,000 customer complaints from regulators involving faulty brakes, fuel leaks and clutch malfunctions dating back more than 20 years. This resulted in the recall of over one million vehicles and a promise by remorseful Mitsubishi executives that they would improve quality control procedures.

In the wake of the second Mitsubishi scandal in June 2004, Japan’s transport ministry took steps to strengthen its vehicle recall system, using the Internet to assess customer complaints and introducing verification tests. It seems to have had a dramatic effect.

Within months, Toyota recalled 330,000 vehicles and claimed it was aware of 11 cases of defects. Police investigations later revealed 82 cases dating back eight years, causing Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe to publicly apologise to customers and admit “problems in Toyota’s operating system”. Since then, the number of Japanese vehicles recalled has been huge and has involved all the leading Japanese manufacturers.

In 2006, Toyota recalled well over a million vehicles while police discovered evidence of possible professional negligence at Toyota in not recalling vehicles after five people were injured. This prompted the Japanese government to instruct Toyota to improve its systems for handling vehicle defects. Still, in 2007, Toyota has had three major recalls involving about 750,000 vehicles, while Nissan has recalled over 1.1m, Mazda nearly 300,000 and Honda 165,000.

In December 2006, the Yokohama summary court acquitted the former chairman of Mitsubishi Fuso and his two colleagues of the 2004 cover-up charge.

Crane exposure

In the same June in 2004 that saw Mitsubishi Fuso executives charged, and when the Japanese Transport Ministry strengthened the recall system, major recalls began to emerge from the crane industry. On June 22, Tadano issued a recall of the 16t capacity TR-160M rough terrain cranes built between September 1997 and May 2004. The 425 cranes involved had a problem with the routing of a brake hose.

Six weeks later, a 33-year-old woman was killed and five others injured when a road-going rough terrain crane crashed into her car travelling along the opposite side of the road. Investigations revealed that the operator had turned the steering wheel in one direction but the crane had steered in the opposite direction. Worse, there had been ten prior similar accidents dating back to 1992: five involving Tadano cranes, four with Kobelco cranes and one with a Komatsu.

It turned out that the dashboard of all of these cranes featured a manual switch for the operator to flick when he was traveling the crane over the rear of the chassis. The 1992 accident occurred when the operator of a Komatsu RT accidentally knocked the switch, changing its steering mode without apparently knowing it.

There are historical reasons why road-going cranes in Japan had this unusual feature. Over the past 30 years, the original US rough terrain crane concept has been adapted to the needs of a very different marketplace. The US rough terrain crane is, and has always been, an off-road vehicle, designed and manufactured in compliance with the design rules and government regulations applicable to off-highway vehicles.

But Japan prefers to have road-going rough terrains. In the early 1970s, the Japanese domestic telescopic crane remained a 100% truck crane market. When Grove’s licensee, Nippon Grove Corporation (NGC), manufactured several 18 US ton (16t) RT 60S and 30 US ton (27t) RT 63S rough terrain cranes in Japan during 1972/3, they were based directly on the original US designs—with no highway travel capability. The Japanese customer immediately rejected the Grove RTs, apparently due to their lack of road travel capability, and only six of these cranes were manufactured by NGC.

In 1970, Tadano had just introduced its first RT crane, the 15t capacity TR-150. It would appear that Tadano had done its homework on the needs of the domestic market, and recognized what Grove had missed. In its marketing literature for the new RT crane, the manufacturer claimed, “The TR150 moves from one site to another at speeds as high as a truck crane by its normal two-wheel drive”.

Rough terrain cranes eventually came to dominate the Japanese market, although it took more than ten years before sales of rough terrain cranes would grow to significance, despite the fact that they were favoured with lower road registration and acquisition taxes. Small RTs of up to 25t capacity were also relatively free from travel restrictions, the 40 km/hr (27 mph) travel road speed limit being of little consequence during the morning and evening congestion common in urban Japan.

In other words, the Japanese market required RTs that had helpful jobsite features, such as reverse steering, that could still travel at the speed of automobiles on highways.

Early Western manufacturers had taken safety precautions to deal with the problem of reverse steering. Automatic steering switch controls were standard equipment on all Coles UK diesel electric lattice boom yard cranes produced in their tens of thousands since the 1950s and subsequently became standard equipment on Coles swing-cab rough terrain cranes. Similar devices were subsequently offered by US RT crane manufacturers including Grove, Bantam, Lorain and others, even though none of these cranes were designed or approved for high speed travel or road travel.

Japanese manufacturers and users also took steps to reduce the risks of the reverse steering mode, before the recall. First, crane operators were prohibited from driving cranes on roads using the reverse steering mode. Secondly, electronic safety devices in the crane automatically switch the crane steering back, even if the crane operator forgets to flick the switch. "When the boom is directed to the front side of the crane, normally it [the crane] will not go into such a reverse steering state, even if the operator failed to release the reverse steering switch," Tadano said in a 2004 service bulletin about the issue. But it added: "However, in case of any electric failure of the switch, the crane remains in a reverse steering state."

By the end of 2005 some 20,000 RTs manufactured by Tadano, Kobelco and Komatsu had been recalled due to this reverse steering issue.

As testament to the sensitivity of this issue even now, only Kato wished to comment publicly on the issue of recalls.

Asked if the 2004 recalls were forced by a wave of public fear about vehicle safety in general, Kato executive officer of product assurance Yoshitaka Yanagi replied no. "In Japan, rough terrain cranes are manufactured under the same certification and registration system as automobiles, and they are allowed to run on public roads. As a matter of fact, we feel that the recall is still necessary from a safety point of view," he said.

Although it is important for one manufacturer to have broken what seems like an official silence surrounding the issue, on the other hand, Kato’s view is the least relevant. It has recalled the fewest cranes by far, and none because of reverse steering.