Trump wants to bring Japan’s ‘cute’ tiny cars to America — but it may not be easy

“It’s easy to want to drive one of these cute kei cars. It’s another thing to put your family in them and travel down the highway at 70 mph between a Suburban and an F-150,” said Tifani Sadek, director of the University of Michigan Law School’s Law and Mobility Program.

Taking their name from the Japanese word “kei-jidōsha,” which means a light truck, kei cars were developed after World War II to stimulate Japan’s automotive industry and encourage car ownership, with the vehicles qualifying for lower road taxes and insurance premiums.

They’re not a brand by themselves, but rather a vehicle class — restrained by size and power — manufactured by several Japanese companies, including Honda, Suzuki and Daihatsu. Both gas and electric variants are available.

“The Japanese government has actively promoted kei cars as part of its national policy,” said Shigeru Matsumoto, an economics professor at the Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo. “Although kei cars are not well-suited for long-distance driving, they are frequently used for daily errands.”

In rural Japan where roads are narrow, these compact cars are often purchased as a second vehicle and are particularly popular among women, Matsumoto said.

They remain a rare sight in the U.S., but demand for imports has steadily increased, Japanese export data shows, partly due to cheaper maintenance and lower running costs.

McChristian said he bought his for $900 at an auction in Japan nearly three years ago. Even after paying another $2,500 in shipping fees, he said, “you’re not going to find anything in the new or used U.S. market that has so much utility and reliability for such a low price.”

But there are bigger hurdles than just consumer behavior for hopes of kei cars breaking into the U.S. market. The cars fall short of federal vehicle safety standards, with many lacking even air bags. That means getting a hand on one is difficult, with imports only allowed under an exemption for cars more than 25 years old.

Even then, a patchwork of state laws take differing approaches to their use, with some states barring them from public roads or restricting them to low-speed neighborhood streets. Lone Star Kei, an advocacy group of which McChristian is president, has fought for legal changes in Texas and elsewhere.

Trump’s interest in kei cars appears to be about manufacturing similar small-sized cars in the U.S. rather than easing the process of importing them from Japan.

Among the major kei car manufacturers, few have existing large-scale car manufacturing operations in the U.S.

Mike Smitka, emeritus professor of economics at Washington and Lee University, pointed out the decline in sales of existing small cars across the U.S., adding that there was a “real barrier on the cost side of manufacturers.”

“You would have to make a car from scratch at the assembly plant level that would meet U.S. specifications, because retrofitting is brutally expensive,” he said.

A U.S.-manufactured kei-style car would easily soar past the typical $10,000 price tag in Japan, Smitka and others say.

Legal hurdles to a kei-style revolution could theoretically be swept away if Congress amends the Safety Act or passes new legislation encouraging their use.

“I am not holding my breath on this one,” Sadek said.

Another pathway would be for the federal government to update safety standards, but Sadek said that “changing a federal rule simply takes time.”

Even if those changes are made, hopes of U.S. cities filled with kei cars seem distant. “The reality is that this type of car would be in almost every case of the second or third car the American family would own,” Thomas Prusa, an economics professor at Rutgers University, said.

There could be a case to be made for dense cities like New York or Chicago or retirement communities in Florida, which have already adopted golf carts, to use such cars, Prusa said.

“You could imagine how much easier New York City transportation would be if all New Yorkers were driving substantially smaller vehicles,” he said. “I just don’t see in the United States that this fits right currently with the American culture.”