Suzuki Calls Consumer Group’s Safety Tests on Samurai ‘Flawed’
Suzuki officials lashed out Thursday at charges by Consumer Reports magazine that its popular Samurai utility vehicle is dangerously unsafe and prone to roll over.
Suzuki called the magazine’s charges “unfounded,” “defamatory,” and politically motivated, and said it is mounting an “investigation” of ties between the magazine’s publisher and other consumer groups.
“We will not allow the magazine’s biased and untrue statements to go unchallenged,” said Doug Mazza, general manager of Suzuki’s American sales arm. “The Consumer Reports tests were seriously flawed.”
He added that a lawsuit against the magazine, apparently charging libel or slander, “is certainly an option.” He charged that the magazine, along with the Center for Auto Safety, a Washington-based consumer group, have apparently targeted the Samurai in a political campaign to persuade the federal government to issue new auto safety standards covering roll-over accidents.
A spokeswoman for Consumers Union, the Mount Vernon, N.Y., nonprofit consumer group that publishes Consumer Reports, called Suzuki’s charges “absurd.”
Marnie Goodman, the group’s spokeswoman, dismissed Suzuki’s threat of a lawsuit and an investigation as “just intimidation. It’s laughable. What are they going to do, hire Sam Spade?”
Meanwhile, Mazza appeared flustered and confused when he said at the end of Suzuki’s lengthy press conference--during which he and Jon S. McKibben, an independent engineer from Irvine hired by the firm, repeatedly criticized the magazine for using shoddy and biased testing procedures--that Suzuki has not yet seen the magazine’s test data. That data is the basis for Consumer Reports’ decision to give the Samurai its first “not acceptable” car rating in a decade.
“We did not ask for the data in a timely enough manner so that we would have received it yet,” Mazza said when first asked if Suzuki had studied the magazine’s data. When asked when the company did ask to see the data, Mazza said: “We haven’t asked for it yet.”
To add to the confusion, Goodman of Consumer Reports later said the consumer group has already given Suzuki film of its tests and a copy of the article about the Samurai that will run in the July issue of the magazine.
The controversy over the Samurai first erupted last week when Consumers Union said the Samurai is so unsafe that Suzuki should recall all 150,000 now on the road, refund the purchase price to their owners and take the vehicle off the market.
Consumers Union said basic design flaws tend to make the Samurai roll over even when performing relatively routine turning maneuvers. With a high center of gravity and a narrow wheel base, the Samurai is more prone to roll over than other sports utility vehicles, the group added.
Consumers Union has asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to open a safety investigation of the Samurai as well. Since the Samurai’s 1985 introduction, the federal government has received 44 reports of roll-over accidents involving Samurais, which reportedly caused 16 deaths and 53 injuries, according to a spokesman for the traffic safety agency.
But the federal agency has not conducted any safety investigations of the problem, and there have been no safety-related recalls on the Samurai.
Suzuki’s press conference on Thursday, broadcast via satellite to reporters around the country, was the latest step in a hectic effort by Suzuki to counter the flood of negative publicity that has followed the consumer group’s charges.
Mazza said Suzuki has spent $1.5 million on television advertising in the last week and has tried to place most of its ads during network and local news programming. But Mazza said some television networks and local stations had balked at running the ads in the middle of news shows since the Suzuki roll-over issue was an ongoing news story being covered during the broadcasts.
But despite Suzuki’s efforts, Mazza conceded that the roll-over issue is having an impact on Samurai sales. He refused to provide any interim sales statistics--auto import sales are publicly reported only at the end of each month--but said “it clearly will have a negative effect.”
He also acknowledged that some auto insurance firms have expressed concern about the roll-over reports and said Suzuki officials will meet with them to reassure them about the vehicle’s safety.
Suzuki sales were starting to fall even before the safety controversy because of rising prices due to the Japanese yen’s rapid increase in value against the dollar. Suzuki has had to hike Samurai prices by about 30% since its introduction, and sales were down 6.4% in May, compared to May, 1987.
