WilshireMove over, Ford and Chevy: Kei trucks are pulling up as customers opt for smaller, cheaper vehicles
9point6I’m sorry, why the fuck aren’t these street legal in more than half of the states? The article says something about safety, but these are street legal all over Europe where we have stronger safety regulations.
Also there’s something I can’t put my finger on about the journalist choosing a hero image of the van losing its cargo.
Probably because it’s not safe to drive them around giant pickups who can’t see over their hoods
How’s that different from driving a car roughly the same size?
Just noting as a reference these trucks are 11ft long, a Miata is roughly 20% longer at 13ft.
Just for reference a Fiat 500 is roughly 9.75 feet long.
Maybe in the 70s, a modern 500 is listed at 11.6 ft
It looks like I got my info mixed up, thank you for the correction.
Doing comparisons like these don’t make sense when motorcycles and trikes exist.
I didn’t intend for it to be a comparison, I just find many people hear “small truck” and imagine “like a ford ranger but smaller”, as their starting reference point. Gotta go smaller, scale is tough.
My bad. It just seems like the low hanging fruit everyone plays off of.
We actually used to get vehicles close to this size. The Suzuki samurai (really a jimny) was sold here for a number of years. Geo sold a fair number of almost kei cars that Suzuki made.
I’m a fan of limiting them from interstate highways, but keeping them registrable. It’s just dumb they cite “safety” even though the law explicitly calls out they aren’t required to be safe. I just want a nice 25-45 mph city truck to lug dirty junk around.
But if anyone is curious, Douglas deBoard imported so many European cars in the 80’s that cut into the profits of Mercedes USA enough that they pushed the law through. Buying them in Europe and importing them was actually cheaper (in some aspects) than buying a US market one. And the imported cars were better equipped!
It wasn’t even about protecting American manufacturers or trucks. Mercedes has just always been a huge dick.
No lie. Gray market Mercedes were awesome. Way more powerful and you could get base models with zero cruft - manual transmissions and wind up windows.