The design is bad. The front trunk is a bad use of space, and the Japanese figured this out decades ago with the Kei truck. If you want to see real utility, look at this design.
Americans won’t buy a Kei truck though. Granted, the frunk is a marketing concession, but it’s a fine one, if it can help push the market away from huge and expensive SUVs.
Or, more succinctly, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Americans can’t buy them new because of the so-called Chicken Tax. We can only import them if they’re speed-governed, or at least 25 years old.
Even with those restrictions, lots of Americans want them, including me. There are quite a few importers bringing them over, including one that just started up in my area. They’re desirable enough that major media outlets are running articles about how people who need to get real work done covet kei trucks.
Yes, Americans would buy them. Americans are buying them.
It’s not the chicken tax itself, even if it plays a role. It’s that the chicken tax makes it not economically feasible to try to import light trucks, so they aren’t designed to U.S. emissions and safety regulations. And several U.S. regulations are, in my opinion, misguided, but that doesn’t really change the fact that an importer wouldn’t be able to comply with vehicles that weren’t engineered to those specifications.
Meanwhile, the cars and trucks engineered to American safety and emissions regulations face the perverse incentive to get bigger. This article describes some of the overall issues but contains this interesting nugget:
That’s a sensible recommendation. Except the 3,000-pound 2010 Ranger featured by IIHS has become the bigger and taller 2024 Ford Ranger, which weighs up to 5,325 pounds. Like so many US cars, the Ranger got supersized, a trend fed by a mix of consumer desires and government regulations that carved out gas efficiency loopholes for the trucks and SUVs that make up a swelling share of the US vehicle fleet.
In a sense, the trend of people wanting kei trucks paradoxically comes from the same reason why they’re not street legal: they didn’t get bigger because they weren’t subject to U.S. regulations pushing trucks to get bigger, but the noncompliance with those regulations makes them impossible to import and register (at least until they’re 25 years old).
That’s cute. Do you have any idea how auto regulations work in Japan? The Auto industry owns the politicians and is the reason that cars are forced to be taken off the road after a set number of years. If companies like Toyota don’t want to make an EV, the government will not force the matter.
The design is bad. The front trunk is a bad use of space, and the Japanese figured this out decades ago with the Kei truck. If you want to see real utility, look at this design.
The front trunk is a safety feature called a crumple zone and is objectively safer to be in a crash with.
European vans are probably the safest of utility cars, they don’t have a front trunk.
Americans won’t buy a Kei truck though. Granted, the frunk is a marketing concession, but it’s a fine one, if it can help push the market away from huge and expensive SUVs.
Or, more succinctly, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Americans can’t buy them new because of the so-called Chicken Tax. We can only import them if they’re speed-governed, or at least 25 years old.
Even with those restrictions, lots of Americans want them, including me. There are quite a few importers bringing them over, including one that just started up in my area. They’re desirable enough that major media outlets are running articles about how people who need to get real work done covet kei trucks.
Yes, Americans would buy them. Americans are buying them.
It’s not the chicken tax itself, even if it plays a role. It’s that the chicken tax makes it not economically feasible to try to import light trucks, so they aren’t designed to U.S. emissions and safety regulations. And several U.S. regulations are, in my opinion, misguided, but that doesn’t really change the fact that an importer wouldn’t be able to comply with vehicles that weren’t engineered to those specifications.
Meanwhile, the cars and trucks engineered to American safety and emissions regulations face the perverse incentive to get bigger. This article describes some of the overall issues but contains this interesting nugget:
In a sense, the trend of people wanting kei trucks paradoxically comes from the same reason why they’re not street legal: they didn’t get bigger because they weren’t subject to U.S. regulations pushing trucks to get bigger, but the noncompliance with those regulations makes them impossible to import and register (at least until they’re 25 years old).
They don’t make electric Kei trucks though.
Yet.
That’s cute. Do you have any idea how auto regulations work in Japan? The Auto industry owns the politicians and is the reason that cars are forced to be taken off the road after a set number of years. If companies like Toyota don’t want to make an EV, the government will not force the matter.