Nissan Says Corporate Snoop Suit is ‘Absurd’ : Litigation: An employee investigating U.S. life styles was ‘very up front’ with the couple he lived with, auto maker says.
A Costa Mesa couple’s charges that the Nissan Motor Corp. planted a Japanese man in their house as a corporate snoop are “totally absurd” because the young employee was “very up front” about his efforts to study the automotive habits of an American family, Nissan officials said Friday.
In a statement issued one day after Stephen and Maritza French filed suit against the auto maker, Nissan officials said Takashi Morimoto made it clear that he was renting a room from the family as part of his research on the American car-buying public.
“Mr. Morimoto was very up front with the French family about the fact that he worked for Nissan, and that he was in the U.S. to better understand U.S. life styles and attitudes about cars,” says the one-page statement issued from the firm’s U.S. headquarters in Carson.
“Far from being secretive, he was plainly seen in the neighborhood photographing various cars, homes and garages.”
The statement went on to attack the basic underpinnings of the lawsuit and the firestorm of news coverage it sparked, saying “the saddest element” of the entire episode was “that our judicial system would even allow (the Frenches’ lawsuit) to be filed.”
“Nissan is in the business of building cars,” the statement continues. “We try to build cars that meet the needs of Americans by studying the way Americans drive and buy their automobiles. That the media, the courts and our legal system are being tied up because Mr. Morimoto did research on how we buy and use cars is a truly regrettable situation.”
It also notes that Nissan employs more than 7,000 people in the United States and provides jobs for 50,000 others through 1,100 independent dealerships.
“That our employees and our dealer’s employees have to be tainted by this absurd lawsuit and unfair publicity is indeed unfortunate,” the statement concludes.
For several years, Japanese auto makers have made a practice of dispatching researchers to study American families in an effort to better understand the U.S. car-buying public. Typically, the families are asked to voluntarily participate in the research.
The French family does not dispute they were aware that Morimoto, who rented a room in their house for six weeks last summer, worked for Nissan.
But they contend in their lawsuit, filed Thursday in Superior Court in Santa Ana, that Morimoto never made it clear he would be conducting a investigation of their life style so that Nissan could better design cars for the U.S. market. The family said they first learned Morimoto was acting as a sort of automotive operative upon reading an article in The Times that described his mission.
The lawsuit alleges that Morimoto was little better than “a spy,” and charges the auto maker with fraud, invasion of privacy, trespassing and unfair business practices. It also seeks a court order forbidding Nissan from dispatching emissaries such as Morimoto into the homes of unsuspecting families, suggesting the firm is “engaging in a pattern and practice of conducting market research by invading the privacy of American consumers.”
Nancy Kaufman, the Santa Ana attorney representing the family, said Nissan’s statement Friday had sidestepped the real issues of the legal tussle.
“They haven’t met it head on,” she said. “What we’ve said is that Nissan has behaved in a rather underhanded and surreptitious manner. A statement like this doesn’t change all that.”
In a related matter, Kaufman said she planned to dismiss charges that the family filed in the case against the Japanese American Cultural Center. Although the center was named in the lawsuit, it had no role in the episode other than acting as the landlord for a firm that placed Morimoto with the French family, Kaufman said.
