Farmers and universities have been picking up kei trucks for the last few years for things like groundskeeping work. Being able to sell a brand-new vehicle with parts availability to these customers is what Toyota is trying to capitalize on
I have a few friends who've purchased older kei trucks. One for use on his property, the other got his tagged in NC (IIRC, it was NC). The local bicycle shop also has a kei van as their "shop truck" (another used one imported from Japan). The imports will go faster than 25mph, but they are terrible on the highway. The 25mph is an artificial limit to meet LSV regulations.
All that said, $25k isn't cheap when you can get a basic Polaris SXS for $15k. It might not be street legal in many states, but much of the usage is going to be on private property.
In rural Iowa I saw a ton of those little "UTV", gators, or whatever various brands call them which are effectively beefed up golf carts being driven around town. Trucks have become so enormous and expensive that these somewhat street legal vehicles are taking over for people who just need to go here and there.
A friend with a WFH tech job, who lives on his own land (with family and various critters), bought one a few years ago for hauling materials and supplies around his property.
Fleets, as evidenced by Toyota/Scion saying they will exclusively sell to fleet purchasers. My local university, for an example, had 20 or so Daihatsu Hijets when I went to school there, which have given way to far more expensive Ford Bronco Sports and similar. I assume the lack of parts supply and repairability of the Hijets attrited them away. Domestically producing them to keep the chicken tax/tariffs at bay and having dealer service at the local Toyota dealership will make these appealing again in those markets.
LSV's like this are extremely popular in the retirement home communities like The Villages in Florida. They're allowed on the golf cart paths, and also on a few roads where golf carts aren't allowed.
I like the concept, I just find myself wondering if the Big 3 will pull another Chicken Tax move to protect the full-size pickup golden geese.
Toyota - and Japan in general - has a helluva trade relationship with the US, but that's effectively all Detroit knows how to beat the world at anymore and they love the margins on their truck portfolios, to the point that they considered sedans and most coupes to be too thin to warrant continued production.
"Build" is a stretch of the word for them to knock down some HiJets in Japan, ship them over, then put them back together again. Toyota's PR even says they're only adding another 50 jobs with their "expansion" to build the kei in Indiana.
Would be interesting to know if they're built-built in Indiana, or if they're doing what Ford did with the first-gen Transit Connects: bringing them in from another country (I think it was Turkey in that case) as passenger vehicles with trim and seats, stripping them of those things almost as soon as they hit shore, and getting around the Chicken Tax that way.
600 LB weight limit including passengers, top speed of 25 mph, and right hand drive this feels specifically design to be toothless against American pickups. This is a novelty product, I saw an image of one loaded with half a dozen hay bails and I'm wondering who even needs that? This is a novelty car for vineyard owners and show pony stables. Like you'd get just as much use out of a JD Gator and they probably have worse weight distribution.
The concern I'm imagining is that once you start offering much smaller pickups, they could potentially get customers thinking that maybe the bigger pickups just aren't necessary. You already see a bit of this if you look at the discourse around kei trucks and the smaller ute-sized Ford Maverick. The end result would be a cannibalization of the full-size market by trucks that are much, much lower margin.
Right now, if you want certain things in a truck in the US and Canada, you must buy a full-size, even if they could be offered as features on smaller trucks that would not justify the same MSRP in the minds of customers. I think this is part of why we don't see any real competition from GM or Stellantis to the Ford Maverick almost three years on. GM would rather you buy a mid- or full-size truck, and Stellantis doesn't offer anything other than full-size Rams.
It’s a huge mistake to limit the speed to 25mph. When this is released in 2027, Kei trucks will be street legal in Colorado. I would have pre-ordered this without question but that speed makes it useless for basic commuting or running errands.
There's already a market for off road use. They are far superior to SxS UTVs that are overpriced for what they deliver. You usually get heat and air conditioning in an enclosed cab with flexible bed configurations. SxSs are glorified toys in comparison.
This is exploiting the existing LSV classification to bypass the chicken tax that limits the current market to old used imports. It will be easy enough to mod them for higher speeds on farms.
With a built in 25mph limiter, that eliminates "city" driving too unfortunately. Most roads around me are 35 mph.
There's sizeable demand for people who want to be able to do runs to the bigbox stores for garden and DIY renovation supplies and store it the rest of the time.
I know two people who have been pulled over in the US for driving too slow.
If you drive significantly slower than the flow of traffic it can create a hazard for other drivers.
Generally speaking, much of driving is predicting what other drivers will do. If you behave significantly differently than other cars you do raise the chances of an accident.
>I’ve seen more than one person try to merge onto a highway at 45 MPH and every time they very nearly caused an accident.
Speed differential based ticketing. That guy who stops on the ramp when traffic is going 60 is teeing up the same potential ~40mph accident as the guy trying to weave through the same traffic at 100.
Reverse the default rules of rear ending liability in merging zones as the cherry on top.
We really should reverse the rules of default liability for rear ending in merge zones.
I'm sure there's some kinks to iron out but I think my plan is solid.
Because they can't bear to make vehicles smaller. That's the real terror on American roads. Something like 60% of vehicles are huge because it makes the driver feel better. And indeed, it makes the driver safer in a collision - at the cost of making everyone else in the area less safe. Something has to be done to stop this trend first and foremost.
After that, when vehicle sizes start trending down towards reasonable, we can look at getting speeds up without reducing overall safety.
I think the reason trucks are so huge these days is not the ride feel. It's the EPA gives more lenient pollution restrictions based on size of vehicle. So instead of making the engine less polluting, just make the truck bigger and keep the same engine. It's like a cereal box that's only 1/3 full.
The idea to introduce light trucks in passenger-car shape to get around pollution limits was the car manufacturers' idea. However, the US public ran with it and bought because of the perceived higher safety and social status that comes with driving a larger, heavier vehicle than everyone else. And they continue to buy to attempt to one-up each other even though the pollution limits now apply to SUVs as well as smaller passenger cars.
My understanding was that the American domestic auto manufacturers were getting their asses beat by foreign competitors who made much better cars. American companies could differentiate themselves with giant vehicles that wouldn't be practical in Europe or Asia. But because the giant vehicles became status symbols the low end started imitating them and now nobody sells cars in the US any more.
It's definitely a blend. I bought something HN would melt down over mostly due to the ride quality. I can drive from Houston to El Paso and not feel it.
I don't buy cars based on their pollution capabilities like some Captain Planet villain. Maybe other consumers are different.
You might be the last person on earth that believes this is about safety. The rules are protectionism to keep cheap/affordable vehicles out of the US. Those rules and setion 179 bonus depreciation on large cars are what are keeping the American auto industry alive without having to actually compete.
660cc engine at ~40 horsepower is about the same as a mid-70s VW Beetle - not in cc size, but HP potential.
This little truck could do a lot more than 25 mph if it were allowed to do so. Not saying that would be safe, and I'd not want to ever put one on a busy freeway, but for getting around most urban cities in the US it's fine as-is but would be even better if the limit was ~40 mph.
It's going to go here for what, $15,000? $25,000? Better than buying a 25 yr old one for $10,000 from a used dealer lot that has no parts or real mechanic trained on them but at that price point..
I remember getting into my father in law's kei truck. He literally was given it for free by someone he knew; that is how disposable they are.
And yeah, absolutely not comfortable.
Toyota selling them for $25k is parasitism. The idea of selling a cheap truck is apparently impossible with their cost structures. (Worse, if it succeeds it will ruin the Japanese market)
The best outcome is that this is a mild success and America gets a second generation shit version for 40 or 50k that has been fattened and rendered worthless, much like the second generation XB. (Hopefully the second generation is on some slop tier SUV platform so it doesn't wreck the economics of the Japanese market.)
The headline excited me but a gas vehicle with a 25mph limit is useless to me. When is someone gonna make an EV truck with a kei-like form factor? The Slate ain't it.
For those of you clamoring for kei trucks to be street legal in the US, you really need to do some street view comparisons between Japan and the US.
US roads are built for much, much higher speeds. Kei cars purposefully give up safety with the caveat that they’re only used on low speed roadways, and Japan designs their roads with the intention of these vehicles being acceptably safe in that context.
This newly announced truck is apparently limited to speeds I'd consider borderline unsafe on American public roads (<= 25 mph) because that puts it in the LSV category, and that's apparently the only way you can sell a Kei truck under current US regulations. So they're making it less safe and less useful in order to be able to sell it here, I suppose thanks to reasoning similar to that which appears in your comment.
IIUC a typical "real" Japanese kei truck can manage 60-70 mph easily, if not comfortably. That's more than enough to hang with traffic on the vast majority of American roads, and nobody sane is using these things as long distance transportation. So the "they're too slow" argument is clearly bunk.
That leaves the safety angle. I can't help noticing that motorcycles are still legal, or did I miss something? Anyway, it's very emblematic of the American approach to road safety that some small, light vehicles are uncertifiable on safety grounds, but the sizes and weights of personal vehicles are allowed to grow in unbounded fashion. There is clearly no safety issue with getting groceries and picking your kid up from school in something that weighs most of 10K lbs and has such dogshit sight lines that you could run over a whole school bus's worth of kids in a crosswalk and hardly notice.
Freedom? Personal responsibility? Not quite---you can make a choice to endanger other road users, but never yourself! Unless you ride a motorcycle, in which case that's okay.
Working class buys cheapest available <insert product here>. Allow sale of new vehicles without seatbelts, airbags, etc. and that becomes the attractive thing to lease (assuming it can be insured). Allow, say… uninspected beef & dairy products instead and if those savings are passed on, that’ll be purchased by low-income folks too.
Motorcycles have a built-in discouragement from the cost-optimizing behavior: lack of those two extra wheels.
>Not quite---you can make a choice to endanger other road users, but never yourself!
Would be open to ways regulate enormous vehicles which’re dangerous to the public outside their cabins. Keep taxpayers alive + out of hospitals they might not be able to afford (cost passed on to me).
My point is more about the doublethink re: crash safety across various types of vehicles than the implications of actually trying to bring kei vehicles less than 25 years old to the US (in whatever form). Since you mentioned it, I would much rather we get serious about regulating huge, heavy personal vehicles than start worrying about regulatory carve-outs (or whatever) for kei vehicles.
But, (again) since you mentioned it---"new vehicles without seatbelts, airbags, etc." is a misrepresentation of modern kei vehicles. Kei cars sold new today have seatbelts, crumple zones, airbags, ABS, AEB, and so on. They perform well in crashes for their size---sure, they are small cars, but they aren't a scheme to foist unsafe-by-design shitboxes on people who can't afford something safer.
More recent kei pickups still use the cabover design which necessarily limits your available crumple volume, but even those have the modern safety systems. The imports you see in the US are 25+ years old, which affects their safety outcomes in the way you would expect. People here buy them despite the age and import rigamarole (arguably a terrible value on paper) because there is demand.
---
The Smart Fortwo is probably the closest thing to a modern kei car we've had in the US outside of imports. IIUC they made it work with our regs by designing to them from the start, but in practice its safety outcomes were apparently pretty similar to kei cars in Japan, and exactly what you'd expect: decent performance in single vehicle crashes, but they suffer in crashes with larger vehicles. They weren't sold on the cheap to lure cost-conscious buyers (neither are kei cars in Japan), and ultimately I guess Americans just didn't want to buy them. But they were solid runabouts for city dwellers and didn't feel unsafe to drive in that context.
tl;dr: If there was some viable scheme to sell new-ish kei vehicles in the US, I would not be terribly worried about the scenario you describe, and IMO implying some equivalence between e.g. a hypothetical moderate regulatory carve-out for such vehicles with abandonment of beef and dairy product inspections is utterly ridiculous.
Great answer. Excited to hear about the crumple zones. I'm going to watch some crash tests. Thanks for the Smart Fortwo comparison, a good reminder about that vehicle. I accept it as safe enough to sell and have probably changed my perspective for next time I see a modern kei.
You seem to be better at comparisons than me:
One note on selling new vehicles without safety features: that is an example of what might be made without regulation and what would definitely be purchased on both the new and later the used market by those who can't afford more.
On the beef inspection point, I wanted a random example to drive home that poverty stinks and in every single product category the absolute cheapest SKU has plenty of buyers. You well likely are able to offer a better example I could have thrown out?
The roads are built to accommodate the cars Americans drive. At minimum, we have to put our money and interest towards alternatives for the system to change.
The US tends to combine relatively high speed (45-55mph) with a large number of driveways and conflict points.
Many other countries do a better job delineating which roads are meant for getting between towns and cities and which roads are low speed streets that are often shared with pedestrians, cars, bicycles, e-bikes.
Another topic worth doing research on is the concept of traffic calming. Wide, straight roads encourage high speed.
This product makes no sense. Who exactly are they planning to sell to? I don't think people needing a truck for work would ever use something like this over say a F150.
25 mph works for golf courses, resort, or island use. In rural areas on the mainland, roads connecting towns often have 45 or 55 mph speed limits so unless you plan on staying on the farm I don't think these are practical for trips to go shopping, dumping, hauling, etc.
As for the imports, I saw one of these 90s-era right-hand drive kei trucks at a parking lot a few months ago and talked with the owner. He lived in Boston, said it was super easy to park. Speed maxed out at 70 mph, which is fine for local trips but maybe not for long highway trips.
For people in jurisdictions that allow 30 year old truck imports, and are interested in getting one, there are other countries that use such trucks and have left-hand drive. Taiwan has models from CMC and Suzuki, and I believe South Korea also makes them.
Really? Says who? In Japan, in rich cities, most private drivers are driving regular-sized cards, not kei cars. Some small businesses use kei trucks for deliveries. When you go to the suburbs and countryside, it is mostly kei cars and trucks because the annual registration tax is much lower than a regular car. In short: They are cheaper to own. For normie drivers in Japan, a kei car is practical. If they could afford a regular-sized car, they would probably upgrade.
Man, people are so clueless about Japan here on HN. Let me repeat what I have said so many times here before: All rich non-microstates are mostly driving except their biggest cities. And rich people in big cities mostly own cars. The urban car owner rides a train to work, but they drive on the weekends.
Yes, like most other rich countries, cars are a status symbol. Kei car/truck basically says you are middle class or below. Regular size car/van is the flex, especially German cars.
Most Westerners visit Central Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto and think all of Japan is that way. One big difference though is Japanese families will often get in one car together while Americans can often take more than one car between adults.
Yet another clueless comment about Japan. Do you think the same applies for Parisians? "Even French who grew up in Paris seem surprised that ..."
All kinds of people who grew up in Tokyo are well aware that cars are required outside of a few big cities in Japan. Examples: (a) You have relatives that live in the countryside. (b) You take a family trip to the countryside for hiking or onsen/ryokan or skiing. (c) You watch NHK (public TV) about a small village.
I often get questions about train and bus coverage and they are surprised that you need a car in 2nd tier cities like Kobe, Nagoya or Matsumoto. They ‘know’ that having a car is convenient, they didn’t _understand_ that it was a necessity.
Don’t be that guy that thinks your experience of Japan is the only one.
> If they could afford a regular-sized car, they would probably upgrade.
Cost is a major factor, but so is the convenience of driving (and parking) a car with a small foot print. Plenty of people who could afford a larger car opt to go with a kei car for that reason. My family has one large luxury car and one kei car, and for a lot of day-to-day stuff the kei car gets more use because it's more convenient to park or drive on narrow streets.
And modern kei cars like the N-Box/Tanto/Roox have gotten pretty nice and cost upwards of ¥3,000,000 with lots of bells and whistles - more than some regular cars. Definitely not a luxury experience by any means, but well-suited to city driving and even light highway driving with a turbo.
This is incorrect. I live in Japan. Many people buy kei cars for cities because they're cheap, small (Tokyo streets are sometimes super narrow) and enough for city driving. Kei cars are extremely common in cities, towns and suburbs.
I drove a Suzuki SuperCarry 999cc from Albany (western australia) to Perth, around 400km. I bought it from down there and figured I'd tow it back, but I discovered when I got there that the Carry was too narrow to actually get on the car trailer.
So I drove it the whole way. It was god awful - noisy, slow, every corner felt like it was picking up the wheels and about to roll over. But it was hilarious and definitely possible to do a trip like that lol.
1. The article is about kei trucks, not kei cars. different things.
2. Kei is Japanese regulatory category designed for Japan. Japan is a country with quite a bit of non city places where kei .* are quite popular.
Alphard and Velfire are designed for cities, ideally dense areas where driving them isolates you from high traffic and passers by you force to move out of your way.
* "City driving" which means surface road speeds and the typical stop-and-go of traffic lights, stop signs and other controls.
* "Highway driving" which means, sustained speeds 55mph+ without the stop-and-go. This category is usually judged more efficient, especially for ICE vehicles.
Now, there may be other design considerations, such as "city vs. rural" if they're manufacturing tractors and combines vs. sports cars. And categories beyond these I've already mentioned. So when we say the vehicle is "designed for cities", do we mean that all of these boxes have been checked? Because in terms of fuel economy, "city driving" and "highway driving" both happen in cities.
I had a "car" with a 25mph limit back in 2005 or so, and it was awesome for my inner city living. I barely used my "real" car during the years I had it.
These Kei trucks are everywhere where I live (PNW). They seem like the ideal utility vehicle for city centres if you don’t need seating and are just hauling e.g. soil or bins or something.
How much soil can a Kei truck handle with a 600lb payload. A single cubic yard of soil can weigh up to 2k lbs. Unless we're talking tiny trips to the farm supply store for a few bags, this ain't gonna handle much.
That 600 lb payload is likely the legal rating - which is a limit the government imposes on kei trucks rather than what the truck is actually capable of. A bit like the "gentleman's agreement" in the past to limit Japanese cars to 276 HP that was, in reality, a lie. [1]
Daihatsu sells an "agriculture special" model Hijet with a special suspension that can carry far than 600 lbs [2]. During harvesting season, it's common to see them hauling around full sacks of rice which are rated for more than twice the legal limit [3]. A lot of the kei trucks that get imported to the US are probably these agriculture models.
The penalties for exceeding the weight limit can actually be pretty severe. But it seems police turn a blind eye to farmers making short trips to the processing plant on public roads.
I am unsure if this is sarcasm. As I understand, if you import a kei car/truck from Japan, it is not road-ready according to federal guidelines. There is some minor work that needs to be done. There are a bunch of YouTube videos that explain the rules and process.
Have you ever actually driven in NYC? To go anywhere other than the next block you're inevitably getting on some multi-lane connector or something where the speed is very much not 25mph.
You can count on your hand how many roads are 30/35mph, and those are virtually quasi-highways. Major roads like Ocean Parkway (bisects Brooklyn), Queens Blvd, Atlantic Ave, Pelham Parkway are all 25mph. You can very much get anywhere outside of Staten Island capped at 25mph.
There's a million interstate and state highways that criss cross the NYC area and you inevitably wind up on any given one for half a mile or something. When it's busy 25 is probably fine but there's also a lot of time when it's not.
Yeah, many vehicles do stay on the farm. Some farms are also huge, so you'll see large farm equipment using the narrow back roads to move between fields. You'll see everything from huge equipment that almost blocks the road to little ATVs, all on the same roads with the cars. Everybody around here is used to being on a 45/55 mph speed limit road and coming across vehicles that cannot go that speed. It is just part of living in rural USA.
Can confirm. I live in SE Michigan in a small farming town and it's not unusual to see equipment going down the local highway (not the interstate; just the highway).
I think that's exactly what Toyota envisions: it's a farm/groundskeeping truck. That's why tons of them already get imported to the US. These aren't competing with cars, they're competing with Gators [1]
I know a kid who drove his tractor to school once in a while, it topped out at ~20. If dad had the truck and mom had the car, what else was he gonna do? Using a low-speed vehicle in a pinch is not a new idea to these trucks' target customers. Having such a vehicle but with A/C and airbags is probably a huge selling point, actually.
We have an old Kei truck on our farm, with HVAC though no airbags. The only reason I picked it over a UTV or similar is because it is still street legal here and does around 50mph. I can comfortably take it into town around 10 miles away, pick up supplies, and drive back with a tag on the back and keeping up with traffic.
If Scion limits the top speed to 25mph it'd be useless to me for our farm. I'd still rather buy an imported Honda Acty or Suzuki Carry for the price, if I'm lucky I'd find one with a hydrolic dump bed and still be cheaper than what Scion will likely be able to sell this for.
I suspect the price is gonna limit the retail appeal moreso than the speed. Used import trucks will probably cost less, and they're gonna do the same thing with no speed governor. An official manufacturer relationship will be appealing to fleet buyers, though.
I have zero concerns about the speed governor. That's gonna end up being a flash mod you can do yourself in your garage, I guarantee it. Worst case scenario, someone will start selling ECUs on eBay or something.
Being a Toyota I imagine it'll be pretty easy to disable the limiter, unless it's geared such that the engine is wound out at 25mph in top gear. But that seems unlikely, given how nonstandard the parts would have to be to make it happen. my hunch is the limit is electronically imposed and will therefore be hacked in short order.
Well thats a regulatory issue in the US. Without load, the truck without limiter will hapily do 50mph, and less happily 60+, although it might take you some time to get there.
The farmers in their tractors and the Amish in their buggies don't seem to mind going slow on the county highways. Send like this one is legally not allowed on the highway though
I was wondering why they'd keep the same 660cc engine, but it has a 25mph limiter, huh. Waste of an opportunity. 660cc is fine for going 100-120kph here in Japan. I love my kei truck, but speeds in the US are way too fast. I'd want at least a 1L engine.
why would they build this? i believe there is a legitimate market for small trucks (actual small trucks, not Mavericks), but less than 25mph is just not useable for anything
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[ 2.3 ms ] story [ 123 ms ] threadAll that said, $25k isn't cheap when you can get a basic Polaris SXS for $15k. It might not be street legal in many states, but much of the usage is going to be on private property.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-by-side_(vehicle)
The same places small golf carts, Cushman carts, or side-by-sides are being used already.
Toyota - and Japan in general - has a helluva trade relationship with the US, but that's effectively all Detroit knows how to beat the world at anymore and they love the margins on their truck portfolios, to the point that they considered sedans and most coupes to be too thin to warrant continued production.
That is NOT a lot of people involved.
Right now, if you want certain things in a truck in the US and Canada, you must buy a full-size, even if they could be offered as features on smaller trucks that would not justify the same MSRP in the minds of customers. I think this is part of why we don't see any real competition from GM or Stellantis to the Ford Maverick almost three years on. GM would rather you buy a mid- or full-size truck, and Stellantis doesn't offer anything other than full-size Rams.
This is exploiting the existing LSV classification to bypass the chicken tax that limits the current market to old used imports. It will be easy enough to mod them for higher speeds on farms.
There's sizeable demand for people who want to be able to do runs to the bigbox stores for garden and DIY renovation supplies and store it the rest of the time.
It's a work truck not a Prius with a Coexist sticker.
If you drive significantly slower than the flow of traffic it can create a hazard for other drivers.
Generally speaking, much of driving is predicting what other drivers will do. If you behave significantly differently than other cars you do raise the chances of an accident.
Most cops will likely even pull you over for that.
I’ve seen more than one person try to merge onto a highway at 45 MPH and every time they very nearly caused an accident.
Speed differential based ticketing. That guy who stops on the ramp when traffic is going 60 is teeing up the same potential ~40mph accident as the guy trying to weave through the same traffic at 100.
Reverse the default rules of rear ending liability in merging zones as the cherry on top.
We really should reverse the rules of default liability for rear ending in merge zones.
I'm sure there's some kinks to iron out but I think my plan is solid.
After that, when vehicle sizes start trending down towards reasonable, we can look at getting speeds up without reducing overall safety.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUV#United_States
The idea to introduce light trucks in passenger-car shape to get around pollution limits was the car manufacturers' idea. However, the US public ran with it and bought because of the perceived higher safety and social status that comes with driving a larger, heavier vehicle than everyone else. And they continue to buy to attempt to one-up each other even though the pollution limits now apply to SUVs as well as smaller passenger cars.
I don't buy cars based on their pollution capabilities like some Captain Planet villain. Maybe other consumers are different.
Other commenters in this thread explain that they own Kei imports and drive them faster.
Whether you feel safe is a separate question, of course.
https://afdc.energy.gov/laws/5954
This little truck could do a lot more than 25 mph if it were allowed to do so. Not saying that would be safe, and I'd not want to ever put one on a busy freeway, but for getting around most urban cities in the US it's fine as-is but would be even better if the limit was ~40 mph.
As a result we don't get "right sized" trucks like the kei or more efficient farm vehicles like the hilux.
They are not fun cars, they should be cheap and disposable.
The MSRP for this in japan is less than $10,000,$6000 for the base model:
https://toyota.jp/pixistruck/
It's going to go here for what, $15,000? $25,000? Better than buying a 25 yr old one for $10,000 from a used dealer lot that has no parts or real mechanic trained on them but at that price point..
a Mavrick is better.
The amazon truck is better.
And yeah, absolutely not comfortable.
Toyota selling them for $25k is parasitism. The idea of selling a cheap truck is apparently impossible with their cost structures. (Worse, if it succeeds it will ruin the Japanese market)
The best outcome is that this is a mild success and America gets a second generation shit version for 40 or 50k that has been fattened and rendered worthless, much like the second generation XB. (Hopefully the second generation is on some slop tier SUV platform so it doesn't wreck the economics of the Japanese market.)
US roads are built for much, much higher speeds. Kei cars purposefully give up safety with the caveat that they’re only used on low speed roadways, and Japan designs their roads with the intention of these vehicles being acceptably safe in that context.
IIUC a typical "real" Japanese kei truck can manage 60-70 mph easily, if not comfortably. That's more than enough to hang with traffic on the vast majority of American roads, and nobody sane is using these things as long distance transportation. So the "they're too slow" argument is clearly bunk.
That leaves the safety angle. I can't help noticing that motorcycles are still legal, or did I miss something? Anyway, it's very emblematic of the American approach to road safety that some small, light vehicles are uncertifiable on safety grounds, but the sizes and weights of personal vehicles are allowed to grow in unbounded fashion. There is clearly no safety issue with getting groceries and picking your kid up from school in something that weighs most of 10K lbs and has such dogshit sight lines that you could run over a whole school bus's worth of kids in a crosswalk and hardly notice.
Freedom? Personal responsibility? Not quite---you can make a choice to endanger other road users, but never yourself! Unless you ride a motorcycle, in which case that's okay.
Perhaps an attempt to balance both.
Working class buys cheapest available <insert product here>. Allow sale of new vehicles without seatbelts, airbags, etc. and that becomes the attractive thing to lease (assuming it can be insured). Allow, say… uninspected beef & dairy products instead and if those savings are passed on, that’ll be purchased by low-income folks too.
Motorcycles have a built-in discouragement from the cost-optimizing behavior: lack of those two extra wheels.
>Not quite---you can make a choice to endanger other road users, but never yourself!
Would be open to ways regulate enormous vehicles which’re dangerous to the public outside their cabins. Keep taxpayers alive + out of hospitals they might not be able to afford (cost passed on to me).
But, (again) since you mentioned it---"new vehicles without seatbelts, airbags, etc." is a misrepresentation of modern kei vehicles. Kei cars sold new today have seatbelts, crumple zones, airbags, ABS, AEB, and so on. They perform well in crashes for their size---sure, they are small cars, but they aren't a scheme to foist unsafe-by-design shitboxes on people who can't afford something safer.
More recent kei pickups still use the cabover design which necessarily limits your available crumple volume, but even those have the modern safety systems. The imports you see in the US are 25+ years old, which affects their safety outcomes in the way you would expect. People here buy them despite the age and import rigamarole (arguably a terrible value on paper) because there is demand.
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The Smart Fortwo is probably the closest thing to a modern kei car we've had in the US outside of imports. IIUC they made it work with our regs by designing to them from the start, but in practice its safety outcomes were apparently pretty similar to kei cars in Japan, and exactly what you'd expect: decent performance in single vehicle crashes, but they suffer in crashes with larger vehicles. They weren't sold on the cheap to lure cost-conscious buyers (neither are kei cars in Japan), and ultimately I guess Americans just didn't want to buy them. But they were solid runabouts for city dwellers and didn't feel unsafe to drive in that context.
tl;dr: If there was some viable scheme to sell new-ish kei vehicles in the US, I would not be terribly worried about the scenario you describe, and IMO implying some equivalence between e.g. a hypothetical moderate regulatory carve-out for such vehicles with abandonment of beef and dairy product inspections is utterly ridiculous.
You seem to be better at comparisons than me:
One note on selling new vehicles without safety features: that is an example of what might be made without regulation and what would definitely be purchased on both the new and later the used market by those who can't afford more.
On the beef inspection point, I wanted a random example to drive home that poverty stinks and in every single product category the absolute cheapest SKU has plenty of buyers. You well likely are able to offer a better example I could have thrown out?
Ex. There is no visible difference between Germanies highways (no speed limit) and Switzerland with 120kmh max
The US tends to combine relatively high speed (45-55mph) with a large number of driveways and conflict points.
Many other countries do a better job delineating which roads are meant for getting between towns and cities and which roads are low speed streets that are often shared with pedestrians, cars, bicycles, e-bikes.
Another topic worth doing research on is the concept of traffic calming. Wide, straight roads encourage high speed.
As for the imports, I saw one of these 90s-era right-hand drive kei trucks at a parking lot a few months ago and talked with the owner. He lived in Boston, said it was super easy to park. Speed maxed out at 70 mph, which is fine for local trips but maybe not for long highway trips.
For people in jurisdictions that allow 30 year old truck imports, and are interested in getting one, there are other countries that use such trucks and have left-hand drive. Taiwan has models from CMC and Suzuki, and I believe South Korea also makes them.
I mean, "most private drivers" in Japan is a _tiny_ subset of people, no? Isn't a large part of that basically just rich people showing off?
Yes, like most other rich countries, cars are a status symbol. Kei car/truck basically says you are middle class or below. Regular size car/van is the flex, especially German cars.
All kinds of people who grew up in Tokyo are well aware that cars are required outside of a few big cities in Japan. Examples: (a) You have relatives that live in the countryside. (b) You take a family trip to the countryside for hiking or onsen/ryokan or skiing. (c) You watch NHK (public TV) about a small village.
I often get questions about train and bus coverage and they are surprised that you need a car in 2nd tier cities like Kobe, Nagoya or Matsumoto. They ‘know’ that having a car is convenient, they didn’t _understand_ that it was a necessity.
Don’t be that guy that thinks your experience of Japan is the only one.
Funniest thing my brother has sent me pictures of while living in Japan was a local guy in Nara who drove an imported H2 Hummer.
Cost is a major factor, but so is the convenience of driving (and parking) a car with a small foot print. Plenty of people who could afford a larger car opt to go with a kei car for that reason. My family has one large luxury car and one kei car, and for a lot of day-to-day stuff the kei car gets more use because it's more convenient to park or drive on narrow streets.
And modern kei cars like the N-Box/Tanto/Roox have gotten pretty nice and cost upwards of ¥3,000,000 with lots of bells and whistles - more than some regular cars. Definitely not a luxury experience by any means, but well-suited to city driving and even light highway driving with a turbo.
So I drove it the whole way. It was god awful - noisy, slow, every corner felt like it was picking up the wheels and about to roll over. But it was hilarious and definitely possible to do a trip like that lol.
1. The article is about kei trucks, not kei cars. different things. 2. Kei is Japanese regulatory category designed for Japan. Japan is a country with quite a bit of non city places where kei .* are quite popular.
Alphard and Velfire are designed for cities, ideally dense areas where driving them isolates you from high traffic and passers by you force to move out of your way.
In terms of fuel economy (mileage), vehicles are typically tested and rated in at least two environments:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_automobiles#Di...
* "City driving" which means surface road speeds and the typical stop-and-go of traffic lights, stop signs and other controls.
* "Highway driving" which means, sustained speeds 55mph+ without the stop-and-go. This category is usually judged more efficient, especially for ICE vehicles.
Now, there may be other design considerations, such as "city vs. rural" if they're manufacturing tractors and combines vs. sports cars. And categories beyond these I've already mentioned. So when we say the vehicle is "designed for cities", do we mean that all of these boxes have been checked? Because in terms of fuel economy, "city driving" and "highway driving" both happen in cities.
Daihatsu sells an "agriculture special" model Hijet with a special suspension that can carry far than 600 lbs [2]. During harvesting season, it's common to see them hauling around full sacks of rice which are rated for more than twice the legal limit [3]. A lot of the kei trucks that get imported to the US are probably these agriculture models.
The penalties for exceeding the weight limit can actually be pretty severe. But it seems police turn a blind eye to farmers making short trips to the processing plant on public roads.
[1] https://carbuzz.com/features/jdm-gentlemans-agreement-japane...
[2] https://www.daihatsu.co.jp/lineup/truck/02_grade.htm?item=5
[3] https://store.shopping.yahoo.co.jp/truetools/tnk-kaba-1300rc...
[0]: https://www.honda.co.jp/snow/lineup/large/hsl2511-jr.html
I ordered 1 yard of soil and loaded 30 of the 60 bags. It was a short trip but it did fine.
For scale, 30bags filled it to the top of the bed almost exactly. It was also really wet im sure I was pushing well over 1k lbs
I'm unsure if you're serious.
Yeah, many vehicles do stay on the farm. Some farms are also huge, so you'll see large farm equipment using the narrow back roads to move between fields. You'll see everything from huge equipment that almost blocks the road to little ATVs, all on the same roads with the cars. Everybody around here is used to being on a 45/55 mph speed limit road and coming across vehicles that cannot go that speed. It is just part of living in rural USA.
I know a kid who drove his tractor to school once in a while, it topped out at ~20. If dad had the truck and mom had the car, what else was he gonna do? Using a low-speed vehicle in a pinch is not a new idea to these trucks' target customers. Having such a vehicle but with A/C and airbags is probably a huge selling point, actually.
[1]: https://www.deere.com/en-us/products-and-solutions/gator-uti...
If Scion limits the top speed to 25mph it'd be useless to me for our farm. I'd still rather buy an imported Honda Acty or Suzuki Carry for the price, if I'm lucky I'd find one with a hydrolic dump bed and still be cheaper than what Scion will likely be able to sell this for.
I have zero concerns about the speed governor. That's gonna end up being a flash mod you can do yourself in your garage, I guarantee it. Worst case scenario, someone will start selling ECUs on eBay or something.
Well thats a regulatory issue in the US. Without load, the truck without limiter will hapily do 50mph, and less happily 60+, although it might take you some time to get there.