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Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks

economist.com

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Re: Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks

#231

Post by hedora »

echelon wrote: post #187
porphyra wrote: post #37

One of the most highly upvoted Reddit posts on /r/fuckcars mocks large pickups compared to the utility of a kei truck. https://reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/sdrgv3/japanese_truck... A kei truck has about 90% the bed length of a pickup while being a lot more nimble. The lower bed is more ergonomic to load and unload too.

The /r/fuckcars folks are being a little dishonest here. As another commenter mentioned, this is like asking a vegan for steak recommendations at a restaurant. Subaru Sambar (kei truck) towing capacity: 1,300 lbs Ford F-150 towing capacity: 5,000 to 11,300 lbs Ford F-250 Shelby edition towing capacity: 24,200 pounds And that's just one additional dimension where these vehicles significantly differ. These vehicles are…

RAM 1500: Towing capacity up hill. Zero.

The transmission overheats after 3-4 hours going uphill with no load. They made it too heavy for the powertrain!

It’s also depressingly easy to trigger the overload light on the dashboard by doing things like buying bricks at Home Depot.

Seriously, WTF? Do we need a 2500 class to replace our old pre-fuel-injection GMC 1500? It had better fuel economy and was also lower to the ground. It could even handle mountain freeways!

(The newer GMC was even worse than the Ram, FWIW.)

I’d definitely look into one of these little japanese trucks if I could get a new one and have it serviced. Bonus points if it is an EV.

Re: Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks

#232

Post by sk0g »

jmrm wrote: post #165
moltar wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can still find plenty of amazing vehicles, in great condition in the South of Europe. The weather there is great and cars don’t deteriorate as much. I see plenty of Toyotas and Hondas from pre 97 models. They still cost around 3-4 K EUR probably because they are such an easy maintenance that they will still drive for another decade and that’s priced in.

Please, don't buy our cars here in Spain. Most of people here, specially young people, cannot afford a new car with our 1100€/month after taxes of mininal wage and our 350€/room /month (in cheap places) on the flats we usually live. With that situation, we usually buy cars before 2005 or so, and we pay those 3k to 4k euros in those, and usually with over 250 000 km (155 000 miles). Depending on the model, they even c…

That sounds extremely high for what it is. The second-hand car market has probably gone insane over there as well though

Here in Australia I bought a 6 year old Citroen DS3 for about EUR 5.5k, and it had around 60k km on it. Now I was looking at ~3 year old Golf GTI/R, and you can get them for about a 5% discount over buying a brand new one... Why.

Re: Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks

#233

Post by ryeights »

FanaHOVA wrote: post #224
nyx wrote: post #29

The 25-year import rule here, which bans Americans from importing vehicles from other countries unless they're 25+ years old, is just awful for those of us who would be interested in driving small, efficient foreign cars. It would be great to live completely car-free, but absent major changes to how we plan our cities, it's just a sad reality that cars are a necessary ingredient to life in the vast majority of Americ…

> micro-sized European city cars I see plenty of Smarts and Fiat 500s in San Francisco

Both discontinued. Although the Fiat is making a return as an EV

Re: Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks

#234

Post by Symbiote »

nicbou wrote: post #153
daxfohl wrote: post #50

Wow, my dad runs some apartments and he's always buzzing random stuff from one place to another. He complains all the time that pickup trucks keep getting bigger and harder to use for day-to-day tasks. Seems like something like this would be perfect.

What about a sprinter van, or whatever you would call a Renault Kangoo? This is what tradespeople use in Europe. They're absurdly practical.

Sprinter is the Mercedes version of this type of vehicle.

In Europe we just call these vans, as 99% of the time what's meant is a panel van. They have a roof, so you can even carry stuff when it's raining!

American-style pickup trucks are hardly ever seen. If you have stuff (like construction equipment, bulky materials) to move that can get wet, and wouldn't easily fit in a van, you use a dropside van as it's much easier to load and unload. It's the same cab and chassis with a different rear end.

https://www.vandemon.co.uk/blog/article/different-types-of-v...

Re: Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks

#235

Post by bink »

porphyra wrote: post #211
nicbou wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, European multipurpose vehicles (sprinter vans?) were a revelation. An old Renault Kangoo is cheap to buy, cheap to drive and cheap to maintain. It's a small, simple car that drives and parks like a small sedan, but carries as much as a small pickup truck. I can fit a bed, 3 months of luggage and a bicycle in mine. In a pinch, it's a brilliant microcamper. It's a big box on wheels. You can do what you want wit…

Vans are really much more practical. * protects your goods from weather * more cargo volume * better forward visibility without a long hood * easier to load and unload due to being lower * can park it without people being able to walk up to it and taking your tools and equipment out of the exposed truck bed

I think this is true unless you're hauling something that you really don't want in a closed space with you. Lawn equipment, motorcycle, fertilizer, that sort of thing.

Re: Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks

#236

Post by seabird »

glitcher wrote: post #122
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing the point. Many people buying inefficient oversized pickup trucks don't care that there's smaller and more efficient options out there, but they do it for the status simbol and ego lifting, not to be utilitarian and efficient. I see these monster pick-up trucks more and more in European cities nowadays too, F-150s, Dodge Rams, with some fancy paintjob and big wheels but who's bed hasn't seen any actual use ca…

Another factor is safety. I don't share this point of view, but I have seen others purposely choose large, heavy vehicles for family members so they stand a better chance surviving a bad collision. If you've ever sat in traffic driving a small car surrounded by large vehicles it definitely starts to sink in that you are at a distinct disadvantage if anything goes wrong. So this trend is also at least partially about…

You're at a safety advantage in a smaller vehicle more often than not. If you're in an accident going fast enough for the size of your vehicle to matter, you stand a very high chance of getting severely fucked up no matter what you're driving. You need to not be in the accident in the first place, and driving a large vehicle with worse handling, longer stopping distances, and a tendency to roll over does not help.

Your average person is not mechanically inclined enough to assess the safety of vehicles, usually to the detriment of the safety of everybody else on the road. Another example of this is people's perception that they're safer with AWD in snowy conditions when all it's doing is getting the vehicle moving faster and giving the driver the confidence to push it way beyond its ability to brake in those conditions.

Re: Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks

#238

Post by seltzered_ »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #223
eduction wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can import new tiny cars and drive them all you want on a farm or private grounds, you just can’t take them on roads if they don’t meat road safety standards. Even the advocate highlighted in this article (Economist) admits his would probably be a “death trap” on a busy highway. Maybe the US should create separate standards for city streets and roads with low speed limits, that could be a good way to bring down v…

States vary. Some disallow them on all highways, others allow them on State highways, not Federal....

Yep. Also depends on whether it's a 'kei truck' or something larger.

For example, they recently became street legal in North Carolina ( https://www.ncleg.gov/BillLookup/2019/H179 )

Re: Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks

#239

Post by tonyarkles »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #229
munificent wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still drive a manual 2002 Toyota Tacoma and you'll have to claw it out of my dead hands for this exact reason. I really love the utility of a pick-up truck, but I absolutely despise the size of any of them in the US in the past couple of decades. I wish they still made mid-sized pick-ups that were actually mid-sized. A Tacoma is nearly the size of Tundra was twenty years ago, and a Tundra today is like the size of…

Yeah, what the hell happened? And I miss my manual (1980's?) Chevy Luv.

From what I understand, the two main drivers are:

- safety standards (eg crumple zones)

- emissions and efficiency regulations that vary with the footprint of the vehicle. Vehicles with larger footprint (= width x length) are allowed to have lower fuel economy numbers, which perversely means that one solution to a truck having poor fuel economy is to make it… bigger.

Re: Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks

#240

Post by kube-system »

nostromo wrote: post #210
deelowe wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That rule ain't changing unfortunately. Regulatory capture is STRONG with automotive and the US sees it as a matter of national security (car makers would be pivoted to other ares in times of war).

This isn't necessarily regulatory capture or protectionism. Half of all cars sold in the US are imported. Toyota, a Japanese company, is the most popular brand of car sold in the US. So, yes, you can import cars all you want, they just need to follow US safety and emissions standards. These cars do not meet those requirements, so you can't import them. If you didn't block them as imports, we'd have lots of people jus…

The chicken tax was imposed unquestionably as a protectionist measure.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

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