If you think Trump will bring tiny kei cars to the US, you might be as dumb as he is

Multiple outlets are reporting on Donald Trump’s apparent effort to change US regulations to bring tiny Japanese kei cars to the US, but there’s little reason to think that effort will be serious.

Convicted felon Donald Trump has directed former reality TV contestant Sean Duffy to examine how kei cars, a category of Japanese microcars, could be brought to the US, calling them “cute.”

The statement was made yesterday at the announcement of a fuel efficiency rollback, which will raise your fuel costs by $23 billion and is explicitly intended to make cars bigger and less efficient.

And so, simply by reading the preceding two sentences, you should understand how unserious this effort is. At the same moment that a new proposal was announced to reduce fuel efficiency targets by a third, the same person who is trying to increase your fuel costs and make cars bigger and less efficient apparently also wants tiny efficient vehicles in the US. How does that make sense?

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If Trump did know anything about how the auto industry works, he would not speak about making cars smaller at an event to announce rules explicitly intended towards making cars bigger – these are not compatible thoughts, and betray a lack of understanding of the reason he was even in the room to begin with.

Further, in addition to yesterday’s effort to remove CAFE rules, the EPA is currently trying to roll back President Biden’s improved exhaust standards which included a recognition of vehicle sizes becoming too large and a desire to reduce SUV/truck market share, and Mr. Trump is trying to place a 15% tariff on all Japanese goods, meaning higher prices for Americans if these cars were to come to the US.

Thinking more deeply about the reason why Mr. Trump might have mentioned kei cars to begin with, it is likely related to his recent trip to Japan. He went to Japan to negotiate an end to the unwise tariffs that he himself announced on one of America’s closest trading partners (despite that he does not have the Constitutional authority to apply them).

During that trip, he seems to have seen the tiny cars for the first time (or the first time he can remember, given his senility), and been enamored by them. So, he said yesterday (while flanked by Duffy, who showed apparent surprise as the flippant statement came out of his mouth):

“They’re very small, they’re really cute, and I said ‘How would that do in this country?’… But we’re not allowed to make them in this country and I think you’re gonna do very well with those cars, so we’re gonna approve those cars.”

-Donald Trump, upon witnessing a type of vehicle he should have known of by now, having spent 79 years globetrotting around this Earth, so how can he just be seeing this for the first time except if he’s senile.

Now, technically, here he says he wants the US to build the cars here, rather than import them from Japan. Kei cars are very popular in Japan, but rarer in other countries. Some other countries do have their own small cars similar to kei cars (for example, China’s 115-inch Wuling Mini EV), but Japan is where these vehicles have traditionally held the highest share.

There are various reasons for this, but one of them is due to the high density of Japanese cities. Kei cars are very space efficient for cities that are obsessed with space efficiency in a way that simply is not the case in the US.

Japanese cities are also connected by efficient, fast and reasonably-priced bullet trains, so getting from one side of the country to the other is easy to do without having to stuff the whole family into a vehicle that is under 134 inches long. And the regulatory regime in Japan has been built around kei cars, giving them certain advantages to incentivize their use.

Meanwhile, it’s nigh-impossible to convince any manufacturer to even build a sedan, hatchback or small SUV for the US, or to build any small-displacement vehicle. So this would require a massive change in consumer tastes, which of course manufacturers haven’t been particularly interested in leading, given they’ve been pushing SUVs for decades now.

That said, one of the reasons manufacturers have pushed SUVs is due to regulations which treat them more favorably than smaller vehicles. If those regulations were changed – and that’s what Trump and Duffy have floated – it could open the doors for smaller cars.

But there’s little reason to think either of them are serious about this, given the amount of work that would have to be done to change regulations, and given the work they’re currently doing to change the regulations in the exact opposite direction.

At a minimum, Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) would have to change significantly. This is the set of rules governing safety requirements for all motor vehicles, with requirements for various vehicle classes that have been built and tweaked over time. And these requirements are tailored to how we build roads, infrastructure, and signage in this country, which differs from how these things are done in Japan or Europe or China.

While an effort to harmonize FMVSS and infrastructure standards with other countries would be admirable and has been desired for a long time in the auto industry, the enormity of the undertaking is much greater than a single flippant comment (from someone who probably doesn’t even know what FMVSS stands for).

And in fact, US regulations already do allow for exemptions to many regulations for low volume vehicles. So it already is possible to build small cars in the US, at least if you build fewer than 2,500 per year. So a startup focused on tiny cars could already get started here, and could have been selling kei-like cars all along (say, TELO, for example… but even they are offering a 152in truck, a foot and a half longer than a kei car, and with 500hp, about 8x more than a kei car).

But why haven’t manufacturers made these cars already, then?

Again, going back to the above, regulations and manufacturers have both pushed vehicle sizes larger and larger, and consumer tastes have happily followed, with US drivers wasting more and more money and space on larger and more polluting vehicles.

There is a perception that these larger vehicles are safer (even though they aren’t, and we are currently nearing an all-time high in pedestrian fatalities), so if vehicles keep getting bigger as a result of regulations allowing them to, US consumers will be afraid to buy a car that’s even smaller than the smallest available today. And yesterday’s proposed rule explicitly claims, in its third paragraph, that smaller cars are undesirable for this reason (without recognizing that it’s actually the larger cars that are responsible this problem).

Kei cars are also typically less powerful than the average American car, which even Duffy claimed himself, saying “are they going to work on the freeways? Probably not” (even though most vehicles use about ~20hp to sustain highway speeds).

And given that the American consumer has been sold the dream of buying a vehicle not for what it will be used for, but for every conceivable purpose they could ever dream of using any vehicle for, it seems unlikely that many will line up for a car that they have been told can’t even get on the freeway.

After all, Smart cars did exist in the US, as have various other small vehicles, but they’ve always been marginalized, because the whole culture, manufacturing base and regulatory regime around cars and roads has been built to advantage large vehicles, not small ones.

So despite that microcar enthusiasts like myself want to see tiny cars in the US, the idea that manufacturers will suddenly scale up production of these vehicles in the US seems extremely unlikely without a concerted effort to show that they are welcome here and that there will be a market for them.

And I’m not convinced that concerted effort will be undertaken by people who are currently undertaking a concerted effort to do the exact opposite, and by someone who seems to change his mind with whatever stupid nonsense he happened to see 12 seconds ago on fox. Companies don’t build manufacturing facilities based on the whims of an idiot, they do so with clear and consistent policy that they can be certain will last through a vehicle model’s development and sales timeline (typically around ~14 years from start of development to end of production).

So I don’t think this is going to happen. Prove me wrong, I will be happy to eat crow here.

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