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).
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.
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.
1. https://www.cbp.gov/trade/basic-import-export/importing-car
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...
The chickens came home to roost though, when the SEC declared a $196 million penalty in 2020 in import fines for the Ford Transit Connect, which was imported with a back seat, so it was considered a passenger vehicle for import tax reasons. Upon recieving the vans in the US, Ford removed the seats, turning it into a work van, and avoiding the import tax on work vans, something like 22%. Regardless of if it was clever of Ford or dishonest, the real point of my bringing up this story is those vans were made in Turkey.
https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/ford/2021/06/03/ford-...
Nothing major is manufactured here.
The vehicles Japanese companies make for the American and US markets have no overlap. Nothing sold in America is made in Japan, and nothing sold in Japan is made in America. A lot of those vehicles are loaded up into tractor trailers and hauled off to their destination—Japanese tractor trailers that those manufacturers use aren’t large enough to haul American vehicles in Japan. Furthermore, the economics for manufacturing huge vehicles in a tiny country that can barely build for its own needs and shipping across the world wouldn’t make sense. The raw materials, energy, and real estate needed for the factories are simply far cheaper in the US.
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)
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?
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
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.
Or something along those lines.
This is also why SUVs exist, they are legally trucks for fuel efficiency/etc.
(Quotes because the words refer to the legal definition of trucks/cars.)
In my mind I would like to see the opposite happen, and instead have a review into these "trucks" to see if they are actually what we want for the road.
There's been diagrams produced that through the ages these vehicles have been getting bigger but with less actual cargo space in them. While some in the country might want them I don't believe for a moment they are as necessary nor as useful for the cities and suburbs where parking space sizes would matter.
I want to say there was a Ford which had a fuel port on the rear of the vehicle which had to position the car further forward than usual, blocking the traffic exit while filing up the vehicle.
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.
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 ?
They also encourage lower speeds which could be a plus in every way.
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.
Here's the first google result for "large cars regulation loophole", looks like an interesting read: https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-wants-to-close-the-suv-lo... Edit: prior HN discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35609521
Sounds like it's a value-judgement free decision from manufacturers to follow the incentives from the policy as we'd predict:
way cheaper and less work to make those (now pretty popular) vehicles bigger than R&D and re-tool factories to make smaller and/or more efficient. It would need to be made more efficient to get smaller otherwise you lose power. Truck owners are comparing power (even if they dont use it, and it's sometimes just brand bragging rights) so that sounds like a worse option if you're making and selling them.
The thing about policy is usually somebody big is warning the public ahead of time that the "affordable healthcare bill" (for another example) isn't actually affordable healthcare (it's mandated health insurance), get called debby-downers/negative/hateful, and then it happens that way anyway due to lawmaker and corp PR pushing it through while everyone else cheers. Actually reading the bill and thinking/wargaming how it will apply deterministically with basic thought experiments is discouraged. And all "sides" do this, from incentives.
I question the validity of the spirit of bills when it repeats like that so often. At some point that is the spirit of the bill.
This is of course ignoring the revolving door, regulatory capture, and lobbying angles, which are always in play some (maybe huge) %. Also predictable and deterministic, from incentives.
You didn't reason yourself into this position, so I don't think you'll be reasoned out of it.
More generally, are people doing things because they aren't stopped from doing so a loophole or not?
Are loopholes a feature or a bug? Does it depend on intentions or how it's used to be called this, or not?
More importantly, why don't judges tend to rule in the "spirit of the law" over what's actually the law, if that's so obviously the thing that should matter the most? Are you willing to sign contracts with me on that basis? And see which philosophy wins? Or do you just want to complain and show your disapproval of me?
There's how things are and how they "should" be and simply describing it in terms of a constellation of competing actors and overlapping interests at different layers and forces that motivate them (not always easy to tell, and I've already left open and taken into account the whole spectrum of characterizations: intentional v not, malicious v not, passive v active. I have my own not-strongly held opinion on the car one while acknowledging all of that) means I'm not reasoning (unlike you). Got it.
It has a bad connotation, but I guess not all things that sound like conspiracy theories are false. Another car themed topic is when Standard Oil and Firestone Tires colluded to buy up trolly lines and shut them down.
Things can be a conspiracy of common interests (and not even necessarily be bad), whether or not that's what this is, without involving "smoky rooms" (also known as boardrooms; but for fun on that topic, check out full history of NCR, company was nuts).
Why is it a conspiracy theory?
I'd love to cite GA's Clean Air Act as an example but the rule around qualified vehicles has been amended 11 times since it was enacted in 1996 and I can't figure out how to see previous versions of the rule.
My personal belief is this also explains American bias towards planes over rail.
I kid!
Meanwhile in the US, Ford had a small aviation division that made one plane, closed their aviation business in 1936, but during the war converted their factories to mass produce bombers (most notably the B-24).
Today manufacturing is vastly more specialised, and today's planes are drastically more complex than their predecessors. Nonetheless, even basic trucks are a very important component of modern wars(for logistics), so in case of war any automotive factory could be useful.
I'm interested in learning where it was actually _curtailed_ in some measurable way e.g. due to the public pushing back, or other reasons. If you know of resources/studies on the pushback story, assuming there is one, would be appreciated.