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 just go to Mexico and buy highly-polluting vehicles to save money, and our problem with smog in the border states would be much worse.
The vast majority of japanese brand cars are manufacturered in Japan and imported in the US.
> The largest automobile manufacturing facility in the world for Toyota, Toyota Motor Manufacturing, Kentucky, Inc. (TMMK) is able to produce 550,000 vehicles and more than 600,000 engines per year. Two years after breaking ground in Georgetown, Kentucky,
> Where are the majority of Toyotas produced?
> The majority of Toyota vehicles you see on the road are made in your own country.
This does read like marketing material from Toyota itself so I don’t know if it’s the most trustworthy. So I look at [2]. Toyota makes 8.1M cars globally.
> the assembly of Toyota vehicles in North America came to around 1.75 million units.
So nearly 20% of worldwide production is assembled in the US. 2.3M cars are sold in the US [3]. So doesn’t seem unreasonable to say that the vast majority of Toyota cars are assembled in the US. It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s more broadly true for other Japanese manufacturers.
Do you have a better explanation of your viewpoint?
[1] https://gearshifters.org/toyota/where-does-toyota-manufactur...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267272/worldwide-vehicle...
[3] https://www.best-selling-cars.com/brands/2021-full-year-glob...
With the current regulations, it makes the most sense to sell trucks with the longest wheelbase and largest width.
It sounds as though the 'regulations' are preventing US consumers from having a choice in trucks, which.. kinda makes no sense from what I've seen in the wide range of oversized trucks in the US.
This is also why SUVs exist, they are legally trucks for fuel efficiency/etc.
Or something along those lines.
Now it turns out that making a truck, say, longer by 10% does not increase the fuel consumption by 10%. If you are a manufacturer, you want to maximize the ratio of the allowance based on the square footage divided by the actual measured fuel consumption of the vehicle. The sweet spot comes out on the large side. So the fuel efficiency regulation, ironically, is causing a trend that leads to more total fuel consumption.
I misread this bit, so for clarification for people like me:
Toyota's numbers are 1,144,722 vehicles produced in the US, vs a total of 2,333,262 vehicles sold.
So while Toyota is a Japanese company, half is locally produced, and the rest is imported in alignment with the US standards (that they of course have no issue to understand and meet)
Although I strongly favor allowing import of recent foreign cars, safety features are a much better practical objection for folks who love objecting to good things. Non-US cars would lack many many mandated features and there’s no workaround
I don't understand. If this were the case, it seems like the rule wouldn't make an exception for 25+ year old cars.
I do think the rule is a little too strict, but its almost inevitable that something like it would exist.
This really is the crux of the issue, those kei cars simply do not meet US car regulations by the very nature of their small size and light weight.
Even in Japan, where they hail from, kei cars are a distinct category regulated separately from the rest of the car market with different build, safety, and emissions standards.
It's not some grand conspiracy to favor the domestic market or disenfranchise the used car market; the simple fact of the matter is those kei cars do not meet US regulations to be cars proper.
Trying to drive one on a highway (100kmph) strains the poor thing to it’s limit, and if you are ever in a crash with a real car you better prepare to be completely crumpled.
So, like farm vehicles in the USA?
In Australia there are a set of guidelines required for vehicle imports, they even outline pollution and safety requirements that must be met before it can be registered or driven on public roads.
On-road non import vehicles can also fail these tests and the car is not considered "road worthy".
If vehicles in the US need to be registered, why isnt this a valid solution ?
It's just that all of the above is very expensive and a lot of work, if not impossible. Having to buy a bunch of cars just to get them crash tested is probably the most expensive part, but the rest of that isn't easy either. Coming back to the kei trucks discussed in the article, there's basically no way they're going to pass crash testing.
So it's not that it isn't a valid solution, just America has much higher standards for "road worthiness".
It's been "done" by MotoRex for R34 GTRs, though there is a bit of fuzziness as to their legality as they got shut down by the government. That's a whole other story though.
But if you're not going to use the vehicle on the road and just as a show car, or drag race car, it doesn't need to be considered road worthy and the import journey is much easier.
Its probably just that the government has been bought by the appropriate lobby and this has not happened in Australia yet.
They also encourage lower speeds which could be a plus in every way.
