Aurich Lawson |
Kei cars are the opposite of large American SUVs. While EPA regulations penalize automakers for building smaller, more efficient cars, No Car regulations limit size, weight and power to just fractions. Kei cars are not only small, but also fairly cheap, which has made them a sales success in Japan and makes them highly sought after as grey market imports, especially by people who feel that new cars have become too big, too complicated and too expensive. A few years ago, Ars even wrote a guide on how to import a kei car from Japan.
But not everyone is a fan of the little kei import. As far as the federal government is concerned, as long as an imported car is over 25 years old, it doesn’t have to meet federal motor vehicle safety standards or fuel economy standards; you just have to make sure you pay any import duties.
That’s because the federal government doesn’t issue road approvals. That’s a job that falls to individual states, and they’re increasingly rejecting kei cars – sometimes even in cases where these cars didn’t pose a problem before.
Some states restrict kei cars – in this case, often kei trucks – to use as farm vehicles. Depending on the state, they can travel up to 20 miles from the farm. Some states, such as Alabama and Arkansas, allow them with restrictions such as speed limits or bans on highway use. Others ban them entirely. Georgia, Maine and New York have already done so, and now Massachusetts is joining the movement and has even published a list of examples of kei cars it currently doesn’t allow.
Are they safe on American roads?
States do not all use exactly the same justification for their actions. In some cases, kei cars have been classified as “off-road vehicles” and deemed unsuitable for use on the road. In other cases, state transportation authorities have cited failure to meet federal safety standards as the justification for their ban.
The thing is, that’s not exactly a misleading argument. Kei cars are really small, even compared to cars you’d think of as small, like a Mini Cooper or a Fiat 500e. In 2017, the good folks at the Lane Motor Museum held a microcar rally where I got to drive a whole bunch of small 4x4s, including more than a few kei cars.
And while it was, overall, a wonderfully fun day, it was just plain terrifying to be driving such small cars in the midst of huge SUVs and even bigger dump trucks and Class 8 semis. As I wrote then and reiterate now, half of those trucks wouldn’t have even noticed if they had hit me.
It’s a context problem. In its natural environment – the narrow and crowded streets of dense, urban Japan – the kei car makes perfect sense. But Americans have always liked their cars on the massive side, preferring land yachts like the Ford Galaxie, Buick Roadmaster and Cadillac Eldorado to compact hatchbacks any day of the week. And let’s not pretend that large SUVs are a new phenomenon on North American roads – the oversized Chevy Suburban had its birthday in 1967.
This brings us back to the harsh reality of the laws of physics. If a large car hits a small car, the small car is worse off. The fact that imported kei cars are at least 25 years old brings another problem – passive and active safety has improved a lot in that time, and accidents that would not harm a smart car can cause serious injuries in a kei car.
I reached out to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, the nation’s leading independent vehicle safety testing organization, to see if it had any data on the subject. The IIHS has not done any crash testing on kei cars recently, but referred me to its statement from several years ago, which states that smaller, lighter vehicles that do not meet FMVSS regulations, including kei cars as well as low-speed vehicles (those limited to highways and 25 mph), “should not travel with normal traffic on busy public roads.”
Although the speed of the kei trucks referred to by the IIHS is limited to 25 mph, most kei cars imported for road use have no similar limit and should have no problem keeping up with the flow of traffic. But crashworthiness should certainly be a concern.
