It’s easy to feel jaded about America’s car culture when you travel abroad. Visit other countries and you’re likely to see a variety of cool, quirky, and affordable vehicles that aren’t sold in the United States, where bloated and expensive trucks and SUVs dominate.
Even President Trump is not immune from this feeling. He recently visited Japan and, like a study abroad student having a globalist epiphany, seems to have become obsessed with the country’s “kei” cars, the itty-bitty city autos that fill up the congested streets of Tokyo and other urban centers. Upon returning to America, Trump blasted out a social media message that led with, “I have just approved TINY CARS to be built in America,” and continued, “START BUILDING THEM NOW!!!”
He’s right: Kei cars are neat. These pint-sized coupes, hatchbacks, and even micro-vans and trucks are so cute and weird that U.S. car collectors have taken to snatching them up (under the rules that allow 25-year-old cars to be imported to America regardless of whether they meet our standards). And he’s absolutely right that Americans need smaller and more affordable automotive options. Yet it’s far from clear that what works in Japan will work here — or that the auto execs who stood behind Trump last week as he announced a major downgrading of upcoming fuel economy standards are keen to change course and start selling super-cheap economy cars.
Americans want our cars to do everything. This country’s fleet of Honda CR-Vs and Chevy Silverados have plenty of space for school carpools and grocery runs around town, and they’re powerful and safe enough for road-tripping hundreds of miles down the highway. It’s a theme that’s come up repeatedly in our coverage of electric vehicles. EVs are better for cities and suburbs than internal combustion vehicles, full stop. But they may never match the lightning-fast road trip pit stop people have come to expect from their gasoline-powered vehicles, which means they don’t fit cleanly into many Americans’ built-in idea of what a car should be.
This has long been a problem for selling Americans on microcars. We’ve had them before: As recently as a dozen years ago, extra-small autos like the Smart ForTwo and Scion iQ were available here. Those tiny cars made tons of sense in the United States’ truly dense urban areas; I’ve seen them strategically parked in the spaces between homes in San Francisco that are too short for any other car. They made less sense in the more wide-open spaces and sprawling suburbs that make up this country. The majority of Americans who don’t struggle with street parking and saw that they could get much bigger cars for not that much more money weren’t that interested in owning a car that’s only good for local driving.
The same dynamic exists with the idea of bringing kei cars for America. They’re not made to go faster than 40 or 45 miles per hour, and their diminutive size leaves little room for the kind of safety features needed to make them highway-legal here. (Can you imagine driving that tiny car down a freeway filled with 18-wheelers?) Even reaching street legal status is a struggle. While reporting earlier this year on the rise of kei car enthusiasts, The New York Times noted that while some states have moved to legalize mini-cars, it is effectively illegal to register them in New York. (They interviewed someone whose service was to register the cars in Montana for customers who lived elsewhere.)
If the automakers did follow Trump’s directive and stage a tiny car revival, it would be a welcome change for budget-focused Americans. Just a handful of new cars can be had for less than $25,000 in the U.S. today, and drivers are finally beginning to turn against the exorbitant prices of new vehicles and the endless car loans required to finance them. Individuals and communities have turned increasingly to affordable local transportation options like golf carts and e-bikes for simply getting around. Tiny cars could occupy a space between those vehicles and the full-size car market. Kei trucks, which take the pickup back to its utilitarian roots, would be a wonderful option for small businesses that just need bare-bones hauling capacity.
Besides convincing size-obsessed Americans that small is cool, there is a second problem with bringing kei cars to the U.S., which is figuring out how to make little vehicles fit into the American car world. Following Trump’s declaration that America should get Tokyo-style tiny cars ASAP, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said “we have cleared the deck” of regulations that would prevent Toyota or anyone else from selling tiny cars here. Yet shortly thereafter, the Department of Transportation clarified that, “As with all vehicles, manufacturers must certify that they meet U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, including for crashworthiness and passenger protection.”
In other words, Ford and GM can’t just start cranking out microcars that don’t include all the airbags and other protections necessary to meet American crash test and rollover standards (not without a wholesale change to our laws, anyway). As a result, U.S. tiny cars couldn’t be as tiny as Japanese ones. Nor would they be as cheap, which is a crucial issue. Americans might spend $10,000 on a city-only car, but probably wouldn’t spend $20,000 — not when they could just get a plain old Toyota Corolla or a used SUV for that much.
It won’t be easy to convince the car companies to go down this road, either. They moved so aggressively toward crossovers and trucks over the past few decades because Americans would pay a premium for those vehicles, making them far more profitable than economy cars. The margins on each kei car would be much smaller, and since the stateside market for them might be relatively small, this isn’t an alluring business proposition for the automakers. It would be one thing if they could just bring the small cars they’re selling elsewhere and market them in the United States without spending huge sums to redesign them for America. But under current laws, they can’t.
Not to mention the whiplash effect: The Trump administration’s attacks on EVs left the carmakers struggling to rearrange their plans. Ford and Chevy probably aren’t keen to start the years-long process of designing tiny cars to please a president who’ll soon be distracted by something else.
Trump’s Tokyo fantasy is based in a certain reality: Our cars are too big and too expensive. But while kei cars would be fantastic for driving around Boston, D.C., or San Francisco, the rides that America really needs are the reasonably sized vehicles we used to have — the hatchbacks, small trucks, and other vehicles that used to be common on our roads before the Ford F-150 and Toyota RAV4 ate the American car market. A kei truck might be too minimalist for mainstream U.S. drivers, but how about a hybrid revival of the El Camino, or a truck like the upcoming Slate EV whose dimensions reflect what a compact truck used to be? Now that I could see.
