So many conspiracy theories in these comments about why American manufacturers don’t build smaller cars.
It’s very simple, American Auto Companies are loan companies, not auto manufacturers.
Why would they produce a $10k go-kart with a useable bed when they can get people to finance a $110k SUV at 18% APR?
It’s not about oil, or other resources, or even labor and tooling.
It’s just much more profitable to put you into debt.
Especially because we are a captive market. Public transport is essentially non existent in most areas. You have to get a car, and you have to take a loan on it. Without a car, a lot of places won’t even hire you.
I’ve noticed that Americans do not consider using an armed rebellion against evil corporate practices but talk about 2A rights all the time.
Not disagreeing with you, but Kei trucks lack a lot of standard safety features, so it’s not a black and white issue
They don’t have standard safety features because it’s illegal to import the ones that do.
So the reason is because it’s unsafe, unlike, oh, idk, the sharp-edged Cybertruck?
…both things can be true?
For the record I’d love to get a Kei truck. But they like… don’t have airbags lol
My point is that the Cybertruck is unsafe, and it’s on the market. So the American car market clearly doesn’t require safety, it’s just a marketing point.
I think we can all agree that Cybertrucks are a bit of an outlier here. I mean we used to ridicule vehicles with safety this poor. But yeah I wouldn’t want to be on the freeway in either a cybertruck or a kei truck. But moving stuff downtown would be perfect for them - basically give them moped permissions.
But yeah I wouldn’t want to be on the freeway in either a cybertruck or a kei truck.
Why not? Because everyone else is in a truck so large they wouldn’t be able to see you?
Not a problem here in Europe. Wiki says they can do 120 ungoverned. Seems fine enough. Large commercial trucks, as in “semis” to Americans, but even the smaller Large Heavy Goods vehicles, as in lorries in Britain, aren’t allowed to do more than 80km/h on the freeway. I’m sure the Kei trucks can do that even when encumbered.
This passed a couple days ago and will be signed by the Governor today! Takes effect July 2027.
I would kill for one of these trucks, its so fucking stupid that they are banned
I’d go for it with a slight caveat: They need to uprate the engines a bit so they can cruise on US highways at US highway speeds. While they can reach 75mph ungoverned, you generally don’t want to run an ICE at close to its limit. That’s why you aim for 85-100mph max speed for US highways; it means it’ll be running efficiently cruising at 60-70mph.
Fortunately, this shouldn’t be difficult. The engines would likely be capable of it with a little tuning or extra turbocharger boost. And going electric makes it all a non-issue.
I’d still take one for most stuff. 70MPH is the maximum speed permitted on the majority of the US interstate system, most US highways were limited to 55 until relatively recently (at least in along the East coast).
While you can go slower, you’ll be the slowest vehicle on the road. That’s a safety concern because differences in speed are the most important issue on the highway. The safest speed there is the one where you flow with everyone else.
I would even be happy with a small pickup like the old Datsuns or Mazdas. Instead my choices are Big-ass Toyota Truck or Ford Monster Truck or Dodge Monster Truck.
I have two Ford Rangers which are the US-branded Mazda B2000s. I am SO paranoid about anything going wrong with them because in my market I am FUCKED. I cannot work out of the trucks made after 2012.
ill give you a japanese truck if…
This is an echo back to the 70s, when gas prices were high and there were strict controls over Japanese economy cars. Why didn’t American manufacturers make smaller cars? Well, “no one wanted them” was the line. Miraculously almost as soon as those same Japanese cars started to be allowed on our streets, suddenly Detroit figured out how to make them and dragged them kicking and screaming into the next eras.
Good companies innovate to keep their customers. Bad companies legislate to keep their customers.
Which one do you think is happening more today?
Detroit never made them; they bought them and rebranded them with trim packages.
Here’s news: the US cannot make cars. They only know one style, and that’s land yacht.
American cars were more fuel efficient and size efficient following the 70’s fuel crisis. It wasn’t until the Chicken Tax and Cafe Standards you see the shift from small work trucks to SUVs and large trucks.
This is COMMUNISM! TRUE FREEDOM is FORCING us to use OVERSIZED Cars that use a LOT of EXPENSIVE Gas! ANYTHING else is WOKE!
Maybe US car manufacturers could, y’know, make their own compact trucks? 😀
American Auto Manufacturers are run by ancient douche bags that are desperately holding on to the past.
No, they’re run by ancient douche bags that are constantly finding loopholes in the current laws that allow (if not encourage) them to make bigger vehicles.
If they were desperately trying to hold onto the past, the new Ford Ranger reboot wouldn’t be nearly the same size as an F-150.
The only good Ranger was the Mazda B2000.
that requires a shift in design and engineering, not to mention retooling the actual manufacturing process
less expensive to just keep selling shit in the status quo. change is effort, effort is waste, waste is less profit margins
they retool for every single model anyway. there’s really no excuse
I spotted one in Bloomington, Indiana recently. It parked next to a superbig truck and I’m sorry I didn’t get that photo.
I mean, it’s probably not safe in a crash at highway speeds (if it can even reach those speeds), but then neither are motorbikes and we allow those…
It’s got to be better for the environment and wallet than those stupid Ford monster trucks. Especially since these would only attract people who actually need to carry large amounts of stuff about, rather than those who once needed to transport a fridge four years ago.
They do ok against regular sized cars, just yours are insanely big.
At lower speeds perhaps. But at highway speeds probably not. Remember: You are the crumple zone in those Kei trucks. As an old and now retired Medic and Firefighter, I’m glad I will never need to cut a dead body out of one those things-- I bet it would be a messy and bloody affair. Because while cutting the first one or two wreaks is sort of fun and exciting, it quickly becomes depressing after that and leaves mark that ain’t ever growing back. And I carry enough marks to take to the grave with me.
The acceleration is also poor due to the small low and powered engines. I would not want to try and merge onto a freeway in a metropolitan area in one. And you can bet long money that some suburban weekend warrior Bob Villa wanna be is going to try to do exactly that with the back end loaded with 10 sheets of plywood, 2 dozen 2x4’s, a roll of outdoor carpeting and 8 bags of concrete. And then be super surprised when he becomes a hood ornament for a semi truck rolling along at 60mph or some SUV.
That said, I do think thing such small delivery vehicles have a place in the urban environment. Hell, even a Tuk Tuk, a cheap and popular 3rd world motorcycle taxi/cargo hauler hybrid would be even better yet. They would be excellent for operating on side streets and residential neighborhoods making small deliveries. Just keep them off of high speed roadways. And I’m not sure that’s a solvable problem. Humans being what they are.
As a five foot tall person, I’ve been in love with Kei trucks since I frist saw one. I don’t have one (I don’t have any car), but I would if I could.
It’s taller than my old mk4, and similar size to a standard 4 door sedan. I think I saw a video comparing the bed of a Kei truck to the bed of a new monster drive.tough.mydickisbig.I can’t see children ahead of my bumber so they become projectiles, type trucks… and the Kei truck holds more cargo.
Isn’t there a sin against vanity? These giant trucks are more dangerous than these smaller ones, and they dont serve a purpose outside of vanity.
Oh, those big pickup trucks do serve a purpose beyond vanity for a lot of us. My big 4-wheel drive Dodge Hemi has to do things no Kei can possibly do. I’ve got a couple of trailers that your Kei couldn’t even begin to move just half loaded. And one that it couldn’t even move empty. So your blind blanket statement shows a serious lack of critical thought on the subject.
If you had seen me in town earlier this week at the clinic with my what you refer to as a “monster drive.tough.mydickisbig” truck, you wouldn’t have seen the oils, greases, and other sundry items that I need to live in the middle of a very rural forest. And they were all things I do not want to haul in the “family” vehicle.
Now while I do sort of agree that many people that don’t need a large pickup, there is no way to tell if they do or don’t unless you know them personally. Perhaps they are a trades person who needs to pull and enclosed trailer filled with tools and supplies or maybe it’s a family that has a fishing boat or pontoon boat they use when the weather is nice, maybe a couple of jet skis or a camper/ice fishing house. (Unless you want to outright ban the existence of such things) If you can tell the difference between someone who owns one for sheer vanity vs a need at a mere glance, then scientists really need to study you in a lab somewhere.
Kei trucks have a niche and reason to exist. And they are a great idea and can solve some issues in dense urban areas most definitely. But my big Hemi also fills a niche and has a reason to exist that no Kei type truck or Tuk Tuk can even start to fill. They both fill two very different types of needs and uses. They are both dangerous in their own ways, (what tool isn’t dangerous). And they can both exist in the same space.
what tool isn’t dangerous
I can think of one who owns a Hemi and won’t shut up about it.
What value does your very rural lifestyle in a forest provide to greater society, to such an extent that society and the environment should subsidize the infrastructure and fuel required to support your large truck?
By all means live your very rural lifestyle with a massive truck, jet skis, campers, and fishing houses, but you are a special snowflake in a blizzard of millions - if not billions - of people who can and want to live as part of a flourishing and sustainable society. You should pay the real costs of driving your big truck.
Those huge trucks are also not save in any crash. At least for the other person.
Any crash involving an “american sized” car will be worse than two of these small trucks coliding
Getting hit by one of those trucks at 30 MPH has as much force as a Honda civic at 55 MPH.
Fuck modern pickups.
A Honda civic weights ~1100kg. The kinetic energy of a vehicle is proportional to v2. Therefore, a vehicle going at 30MPH delivering the same kinetic energy as a Honda civic at 130MPH needs to weigh in at 1302/302*1100kg or 20tons. Modern American trucks are too big and heavy but not that big and heavy I think
A fully loaded truck could exceed 10k vs a Honda at 3k. Math shows 55 mph for the Honda. A far cry from 130 mph
He said force, not kinetic energy. They’re probably treating the acceleration term in F=ma as proportional velocity, which strikes me as naive, but it makes the math easier and it’s correct if the error bars are big enough… Functionally you’re comparing momentum at that point, but I imagine you can find some American truck built to evade CAFE standards that has a 4-1/3:1 weight ratio with some version of the Civic.
Either my source is wrong or memory. What’s the equivalent speed for a civic going 60? Or the speed of a fully loaded truck vs a 30 civic?
48 MPH for a 3.5k vehicle vs a 9k vehicle going 30mph. The math is simple. The 1/2 goes away and it’s v_2 = ((m_1*v_12)/m_2)^.5. Big trucks are dangerous but don’t believe everything you read.
Edit: fixed formatting
There is a reason the guy in the article bought a 1990. The US has a 25 year rule for importing vehicles that weren’t sold here. These became legal in Utah a few years ago because they made off road side by sides legal as long as you made some modifications (horn, turn signals, mirrors, etc). There’s a particular weight range they need to fall between. They also have to hold the same insurance requirements and registration as any other road vehicle. I don’t think they can be used on any road above 45.
And I think that’s a good set of regulations for Kei trucks. Particularly the speed. It should keep them off of high speed roadways and more on urban side streets where the speeds are supposed to be slower. They can find a good use in those situations.
Utah’s goal to my knowledge was to get things like this to be road legal since everybody has them out here. I think the kei trucks was mostly a happy accident because of the way they wrote it. Still not use to seeing these at the grocery store just in a parking spot.
I don’t know about other country, but this truck rider in my country (Indonesia) are relatively safe.
People usually using this for everything, like portable shop, human transportion on the back (only legal on small village or remote area), etc.
I still remember riding one on the back for scout activities :)
Suzuki Carry everywhere…
Yeah we have them, and similar vehicles, on the roads here in the UK. They are fine for carrying medium loads, they’re great in busy cities, economical, easy to park.
We citizens need to change the laws to highly tax those oversized vehicles. And we should make them commercial use only. Average people don’t need huge trucks. K-cars are quite cool.
Unfortunately taxes are kinda the reason why we see so many oversized trucks on the market and the reason you don’t see any small trucks anymore. It’s a result of manufacturers and lobbyists gamifying the EPA regulations that came out like 10-15 years ago.
Basically trucks under a certain weight have to meet a certain mpg standard otherwise they’d be taxed at a higher rate. However, there was a bypass for heavier “super-duty” trucks, so now most every truck being sold is classified as a super-duty which were originally meant to encompass “working” trucks meant to haul things like equipment.
It’s really just another symptom of our government being a joke and the result of regulatory capture.
They’re “light” trucks under CAFE standards as opposed to real trucks like semis and utility trucks. If they were smaller I think they would be lumped in with all the other normal passenger vehicles.
I feel like the gas and the monthly cost of the loan they took out against their mortgage is probably tax enough.
I genuinely believe most of these super-truck owners already have one foot in the financial grave and are just in denial about it.
The flip side of this is that people who actually want a small, practical truck for utility purposes cannot buy one in the US. Doesn’t exist. Those supertrucks are all you get now, and yeah, the finances don’t make sense for this utility use, either.
And for fucks sake, nobody point me to the Maverick. That is not any kind of small utility truck and you know it. The Maverick is “well, there’s spam egg sausage and spam, that’s not got much spam in it” except for trucks.
Clearly not, because these dickheads are out there driving vehicles that are way over-specced for their use cases, all because they have tiny penises and need to compensate! Some of these things are that tall that you can’t see an average height adult standing in front of the grill from the drivers seat.
Yeah, and they’re not even needed, except as an emotional support vehicle for their impotent owners. Very few are working vehicles - how often are they seen with the bed loaded up?
A coworker was telling me all about how “once you own a truck, you realize all the things you can do with a truck that you couldn’t before”
And like, he’s not wrong but all the things he listed were my non-urgent to-do list that I keep written down and when it has 3-4 items I rent a truck from Uhaul for the day. I spend about $20 while they’re spending thousands on their monthly payment, not to mention gas.
In 2018, i had to talk a roommate out of buying an F150. He wanted to buy it because we were moving… Two miles down the road. We lived in the valley, and he was going to school in Hollywood. Imagine driving 30-40 miles, daily, on the 101, in bumper to bumper traffic, with Los Angeles gas prices. I showed him some napkin math and he ended up getting a Honda Civic and renting a uhaul.
This made me think of the SNL Californians.
It’s not a joke.
I still remember the route to my Moms place
101 to the 126 to the 5 to the 210 to the 57 to the 71 to the 15 to the 78.
All to try and bypass LA traffic.
The 405 is always bumper to bumper around LAX, even at 3 AM.
That route was the fastest. Or it was like 15 years ago.
I play a game if I’m ever like, waiting at a red light with one. Could I fit my couch in their truck bed? This massive, beefy truck that may have cost nearly a 100k…
I dont think my couch would fit in most of their truck beds. And I laugh at the idiocy of owning such a machine that is useless.
I remember my redneck hick uncles talking so much shit when extended cabs became a thing in the 90s. I don’t know the bigots anymore but I think they called in right with this non practical trucks.
I rarely see anything in the back of these Earth killing things. And where I live, every idiot owns a diesel version. Louder and dirtier.
Hence the need for a higher level of licensure in order to operate one.
OP is not talking about semi trucks
I’m not either.
Most of these new trucks might as well be
Japan basically takes those cars off circulation by taxing the ownership to the point that its better to get rid of them as they age. Its great for us who want them in their sub-par age. But we might also want to think about doing the same.
I live in Japan and drive a kei-car that’s kinda like a van. 660cc engine (my motorbike is 400cc). I plan on probably eventually getting one of the trucks like in the thumbnail for my farm business. Ask me anything, I guess, if you have questions about them.
How common are the EVs versions over there?
I didn’t know about this so I did some searching. Per https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20250507/k10014798141000.html
昨年度、国内で最も売れたEVは日産と三菱自動車が共同開発した軽自動車で、会社はそれと同じ水準の260万円程度の販売価格を目指すとしています。
Last year, the most domestically-sold EV was a kei vehicle which I didn’t know.
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You’re not allowed to drive those? Why not?
Edit: article touches on it. Low top speed and missing safety features. They aren’t fit for highways but not all roads are highways, so outright bans are stupid.
The other thing to keep in mind is that a lot of US vehicles are missing the same safety features. Where’s the seatbelt and airbag on a motorcycle, for example? A lot of semis also don’t have airbags at all.
Even at 55mph they’re actually not that unsafe in a sane country with sane cars- the driver is so high up that they’re ‘above’ the crash (t’s the same reason semis don’t have air bags- they’re not as needed)
… unless you’re in the US and driving around a dick-measuring contest pavement princess that puts you eye level with a semi truck so you can murder small children easier, that weighs 8000lb.
Yes, they can’t go 70mph, but that basically just limits them to not being able to go on highways and interstates, which is perfectly fine- frankly, we need to have less things being hauled that way, the highways will last longer and our microplastic issue will be largely solved if we stop shipping things in the single dumbest, least efficient manner.
Finally… modern kei trucks DO have a lot of those improvements. They have airbags, seatbelts, all the modern safety features, and can go 60mph. Keep in mind, in most cases semis have to go 5-10 under the speed limit anyway, which means they can basically hit the same speed limits as semis. We just aren’t even currently allowed to import the modern kei trucks.
That’s one of the laughable things in the article. They keep talking about the emissions and safety but they’re talking about the older vehicles that are being used in the US because the older vehicles are the only ones that are allowed to be used in the US. They don’t even come close to mentioning the new vehicles that are being made that have all those safety features and better emissions.
It’s a plain and simple fact is that these vehicles threaten profit margins of the dealerships that sell the unnecessary monster trucks that are primarily sold in America.
P.S. The emissions thing is especially stupid since trucks tend to be exempt from a lot of emissions regulations anyhow.
Motorcycles are a bad example, because safety regulations for them are completely different due to the way they function. Moto gear with a helmet provides better overall protection than an air bag with seatbelts in a car. Also a seatbelt in a motorcycle would be a death sentence.
My electric golf cart goes up to 33 mph max. I had to put lights on it but I got it titled, insured, and plated. I have to keep it on 35 and under roads but I take it all over the place instead of driving my car. Seems silly these trucks couldn’t be approved for at minimum 45 and under roadways.
Can you go from coast to coast without getting on a highway?
How often is the average driver going coast to coast?
This is the part I always chuckle about when someone talks smack about EVs as well. What does the average driver commute these days? Doesn’t seem like much - I’m figuring roughly 30 minutes could be anywhere from 5 to 30 miles depending on where you live.
Sounds like a perfect solution for most people.
Regardless of your daily commute, charging can still be a pain if you are unable to charge at home. Though with non-Teslas being able to use superchargers, that does help close some of the gap.
I think they make an excellent 2nd vehicle for households that have 2 (or more) cars though.
Yes.
They banned fucking tuktuks?!
How the hell am I supposed to be Cruisin’ USA without my Sardine Supreme?
Are you Parker Posey in White Lotus
