Suzuki Files Suit Over Magazine’s Samurai Review
Still smarting over an 8-year-old review of the Samurai, American Suzuki Motor Corp. filed a libel suit Thursday accusing Consumer Reports magazine of falsely attacking the truck as unsafe.
The Brea-based company and its Japanese parent, Suzuki Motor Corp., said Consumer Reports rigged the driving test it used to determine that the 1988 Samurai was unsafe. Suzuki said the magazine further hurt the company when it repeated its 1988 findings in its January 1996 issue and in a CD-ROM that rates cars.
As a result of attacks, Suzuki said, sales of the once-popular Samurai dwindled to almost nothing. Suzuki stopped selling the light utility vehicle--once a best-seller--in the United States last year.
Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, denied the allegations and said it stands by its test results “without exception.”
Marketing experts were puzzled by the lawsuit, coming eight years after Consumer Reports first declared the Samurai unsafe. They said the suit could backfire against Suzuki by drawing renewed public attention to the magazine’s assertion that the Samurai had a tendency to roll over easily.
“The only court that counts is the court of public opinion,” said Ian Mitroff, director of USC’s Center for Crisis Management.
Legal experts said Suzuki faces an uphill battle in making its case against Consumers Union because publication of the Samurai report is protected under the Constitution.
“In all likelihood, Suzuki would have to prove to the court that Consumer Reports didn’t believe in the accuracy of its review, in effect that the review was not only wrong but deliberately false,” said New York attorney and 1st Amendment expert Floyd Abrams. “That is an extremely difficult burden to meet.”
Consumers Union said it believed that statute of limitations for claims against its 1988 report had expired.
The lawsuit alleges Consumer Reports destroyed the market for the Samurai in the U.S. and damaged the auto maker’s reputation, hurting overall sales of Suzuki vehicles. Suzuki said Samurai sales plummeted to 1,500 in 1989 from about 77,000 in 1988. Suzuki sold 33,672 cars and trucks in the U.S. last year, according to J.D. Power & Associates, a decline of 2.7% from 1994.
American Suzuki’s general counsel George F. Ball called the Consumer Reports Samurai review the “single most significant event” affecting sales of Suzuki vehicles.
But auto industry analysts disagreed Thursday, saying that Suzuki has suffered because it specializes in small trucks and cars when the domestic market is moving toward large trucks and cars.
“When you are not doing well, I guess you strike out at anything,” said David Virag, managing director for Automotive Consulting Group in Detroit.
He pointed out that other vehicles, such as Chrysler’s Omni and Horizon cars, have recovered from poor reviews in Consumer Reports. “Consumers are the ultimate judge in the marketplace,” Virag said.
Suzuki alleges that Consumers Union’s test was flawed because it did not reflect real-world driving conditions. It said the extreme steering that caused the Samurai to tip in the tests is not how people actually drive. Security devices Consumers Union placed on the Samurai adversely affected its performance in the tests, Suzuki said.
The company added that the Samurai’s track record over the last eight years does not support the Consumers Union report. There are about 100,000 Samurais on the road in the United States.
In preparing its case, Suzuki hired professional race car driver Cale Yarborough to analyze the Consumers Union maneuver and conduct stability and braking tests on the Samurai. Suzuki said Yarborough found that the Consumers Union tests were “unrealistic.”
Suzuki obtained a similar analysis from Failure Analysis Associates, the firm which helped expose a rigged test in which NBC-TV Channel 4 showed a General Motors Corp. pickup truck igniting upon collision. NBC ultimately apologized to GM.
In response to a question, Ball said he could not explain why Suzuki did not take action against Consumers Union when the 1988 report appeared. He said the company was acting now because it had reached the breaking point.
“You cannot attack the manufacturer of a consumer product the way we’ve been attacked,” he said.
But Consumers Union cited the delay as evidence of the “truth and accuracy of our findings.”
The nonprofit consumer organization said it viewed the lawsuit as a “desperate” attempt on the part of Suzuki to defend itself against product liability suits from rollover accident victims.
Suzuki is appealing a 1995 jury award granting $90 million to a St. Louis woman paralyzed in a Samurai crash. The company has settled most of the 200 claims against it and won two rollover cases that went to trial.
