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Comment by camhenlin | Hacker News Reader

I’ve looked into one of these and they’re completely illegal in my state, no way to register them without gaming different dmv stations and getting a clueless dmv rep who doesn’t know what they’re looking at, to register it. This is Oregon. Really unfortunate situation as these fit a lot of use cases that would previously require something as big as a gas guzzling Ford F150 otherwise.

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I think most people register them out of state for this reason - Minnesota and Arkansas being the two go-to (also for bypassing vehicle road-readiness inspections...).

I wish I'd known this. Oregon's bi-annual "emissions test" where they hook up the inspection machine to the ODB port and let the car lie to it is absurd. When I first heard about it I assumed they'd put some device on the exhaust. They do not.

CA is the same way.

I really wish it was tailpipe based. I liked the PA emissions laws where you could improve the efficiency of your vehicle and it would pass. Not so in CA, must be numbers matching and CARB certified parts/combo.

> I assumed they'd put some device on the exhaust

They used to do it that way. Still do, for some cars, although the pre-ODBII set is now out of smog regs in most states.

Turns out the tailpipe breather machines are finicky and difficult to calibrate, causing false positives and false negatives (sometimes corruptly).

Does that work if people don't live in MN or AR?

Correct

> Really unfortunate situation as these fit a lot of use cases that would previously require something as big as a gas guzzling Ford F150 otherwise.

What about the Ford Maverick? The only issue is that the bed is fairly small, but it looks like these minis have small beds and low towing capacities as well? And Ford makes a hybrid version.

(Don't misunderstand: I'm not arguing against relaxing the rules in Oregon.)

The Ford Maverick is better than most modern pickups, but still misses the mark. As you mentioned, the bed is significantly smaller than a 1990 Ranger despite being 6 inches longer[1]. Honestly the biggest issue I have with these vehicles is their height, which is a known hazard to pedestrians[2]. The Maverick doesn't fix that issue.

[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a36651899/sizing-up-the-20... [2] https://www.oregonlive.com/business/2022/03/pedestrians-incr...

I have questions about the pedestrian article. The article states that almost 3/4 of all vehicles sold are light truck or SUV. So wouldn't it just be statistically more likely that for ANY accident it would be a taller vehicle?

The actual paper discussed in that article isn't just comparing frequencies of accidents, but rather using them to calculate the odds that a given vehicle type causes a pedestrian accident in a variety of scenarios. In doing so the author determined that these vehicles were overinvolved in accidents relative to their frequency on the road.

The sales of the Maverick have really made a compelling case for an even-smaller truck that is one size down. I don't even think ford thought it would sell that well. The Maverick is still a giant truck compared to these.

I thought the whole appeal for the maverick was that it was a hybrid truck that you’d be able to drive around a city (Ford marketing, itll be fine to drive anywhere probably)?

You could actually probably get this onto a state-wide ballot as a measure to be voted on in Oregon. The bar to get things on the ballot isn't particularly high.

As someone else living in the PNW, I’ve read that people in Oregon permits kei trucks, but won’t allow them to be registered and to work around this, people will register them in Washington and then bring them down.

Why are they illegal?

Someone has to pay to have a vehicle certified (crash tests, emissions, figure out what’s needs modified to meet US regulations, etc). If the vehicle was never sold in the US to begin with, then they can’t be registered until they are 25+ years old. Even then, it’s hard/impossible in some states.

My memory is a bit hazy, but at one point in time an importer company paid the large sums (hundreds of thousands I’m sure) to have a certain GT-R model go through the safety/emission procedures so they could be imported before they were 25 years old. That’s the only case I can think of.

  My memory is a bit hazy, but at one point in time an importer company paid the
  large sums (hundreds of thousands I’m sure) to have a certain GT-R model go
  through the safety/emission procedures so they could be imported before they
  were 25 years old. That’s the only case I can think of.

If memory serves, there were a couple people importing R32 Skylines. The one shop stopped doing the necessary work and got caught. Nobody wants to do the work because it's extremely expensive and bureaucratic. The problem with relaxing the rules is that you're either going to accept more pollution or heavily restrict the number of vehicles that can be imported creating an unfair lottery type situation. Keep in mind that other countries, especially Japan, were a lot slower to require pollution controls. IIRC California and Germany were pretty quick to phase out leaded gasoline, but most other countries (e.g. France) were much slower. The safety stuff should be easier to harmonize for imports, but there's still a lot of bullshit in DOT regulations (e.g. everything about US spec headlights).

IMO a step in the right direction would be to carve out some exceptions for EV conversions.

Why would they be illegal? Surely Oregon has "small cars"

It might be because they dont meet safety standards (being 25+ years old and tiny) or because its right hand drive…

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