Suzuki Sues Magazine for Critical 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 sport utility vehicle as unsafe.

The Brea-based company and its Japanese parent, Suzuki Motor Corp., said that Consumer Reports rigged the driving test it used to determine that the 1988 Samurai was unsafe. Suzuki said the magazine hurt the company again when it repeated its 1988 findings in its January 1996 issue and in a CD-ROM that rates cars.

Sales of the once-popular Samurai, which Suzuki stopped selling in the United States last year, dwindled to almost nothing after the 1988 Consumer Reports review.

Suzuki sold 77,493 Samurais in the model year the review was published. The following year, only 1,435 were sold, despite a 1988 federal Highway Transportation Safety Board report that the Samurai was no more dangerous than other sport utility vehicles.

The highway safety board called the Consumer Reports test unscientific. Suzuki also hired several outside consultants to repeat the Consumer Reports test and published their criticisms of the magazine’s results, but to little effect.

Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, denied the allegations in the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, and said it stood 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 dangerous tendency to roll over during crash avoidance tests involving sharp turns.

“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 that 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 the statute of limitations for claims against its 1988 report had expired.

The lawsuit alleges that Consumer Reports destroyed the market for the Samurai in the United States and damaged the auto maker’s reputation, hurting overall sales of Suzuki vehicles. Suzuki said that Samurai sales plummeted to 1,500 in 1989 from about 77,000 in 1988. Suzuki sold 33,672 cars and trucks in the United States last year, according to J.D. Power and Associates, a decline of 2.7% from 1994.

American Suzuki 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 Thursday disagreed, 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 the 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 also 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 that helped expose an unscientific test in which NBC showed General Motors trucks 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 that the company is acting now because it has 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 views 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 left paralyzed from a Samurai crash. The company has settled most of the 200 claims against it, and it won two rollover cases that went to trial.

Times staff writer John O’Dell contributed to this report.