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Comment by avidiax | Hacker News Reader

The difficulties inherent in this and the simplicity of the product itself make me wonder if there's some car equivalent of the "80% lower" of the weapons industry.

Some kind of partially assembled new Kei truck that counts as "car parts" during import, and can then be assembled to create a "kit car". The kit car process is almost equally onerous, but at least you could get a new car on the other end.

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US restrictions on vehicle imports seem very odd from a British perspective.

Over here, we can freely import pretty much anything. If it's more than 10 years old, you just register it. If it's less than 10 years old, you can still bring it in as a personal import, but it'll need to pass a slightly enhanced version of the normal annual inspection. It's a point of principle that any vehicle that passes inspection should be road legal, hence oddities like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paIGBOlkQr0

Because we're a right-hand-drive country, Japanese imports are commonplace. If you want a Kei car or a JDM-only luxury minivan, you can just have one. That taken-for-granted freedom gives me a certain degree of empathy for the 2nd amendment lobby.

A quick Google shows that only 15 states have vehicle inspections. The concept seems completely foreign (and a waste of time?) to me.

Living in Ohio (no inspection "rust belt" state), I saw a minivan's axle pop loose ahead of me on the highway, which sent it into the concrete barrier pretty much instantly. Perhaps you don't have rust issues where you live, but requiring some minimum mechanical function to register a car should be everywhere in my opinion. Generally inspections are either mechanical/safety or emissions. Emissions are based on the car model in every state I've lived in, so as long as you don't modify your car to blow smoke it'll pass. Mechanical inspections are to make sure there's no major rust, the brakes work, the lights work, tires aren't bald, etc.

Exported used car from Japan is considered to good quality, that's partially thanks to vehicle inspection system per 1/2 year.

Unfortunately - that's the only way to force some drivers to get their car brakes fixed.

The UK has less than half as many road deaths than the US, even after factoring in the difference in miles driven per year. Annual inspection is one of the reasons for that.

There are some perfectly reasonable arguments against the cost-effectiveness of mandatory vehicle inspection, but I have some doubts about the validity of those arguments. Road safety and traffic law enforcement involve a lot of complex interrelated factors; Creating a culture of road safety is difficult to distil into discrete interventions.

There's a libertarian argument that driving a car with bald tires is a matter of individual liberty, but obviously that's a vastly broader argument than the question of mandatory inspection. If you're going to have laws against driving a car with bald tires, it's less onerous and more effective to primarily enforce those laws through administrative rather than criminal justice mechanisms.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

Not having vehicle inspections is a concept that's completely foreign to European me. It's literally letting people very lightly educated in how to operate heavy machinery operate heavy machinery that at one (long gone) point probably worked as it should.

You can have lots of weird cars like that in the US too, but only as long as you START with a normal car and then mess with it. Most states don't have anything like the MOT (or if they do, they only check emissions and nothing to do with safety), so once the car is originally registered as a VW Golf or whatever, what you do with it after that is your own business.

As is typical with US regulation, it's a "worst of all worlds" hodgepodge that makes no logical sense.

If assembling your own car in the US was as easy as assembling a gun, we'd all be assembling cars on our sixteenth birthday.

We have the right to own a gun, but in most of the US owning a car is a necessity. There is some route available in most states but it's incredibly cumbersome compared to something like making your own gun.

If cars had been as popular as guns when the U.S. Bill of Rights was written, then such a right might have been included.

Hypothetically, "Motorized transportation, being necessary to the mobility of a free State, the right of the people to keep and drive automobiles shall not be infringed."

Imagine the vehicles we would have. For one thing, the impossible-to-meet CAFE standards, which make it economically infeasible to sell compact pickup trucks in the U.S., would probably have been declared unconstitutional. On the other hand, laws requiring seatbelts and airbags probably would have also been unconstitutional.

It's worth noting that freedom of transit and use of public ways (literally the original "right of way") is such an ancient and obvious part of common law that the Framers didn't deign it necessary to include it as an explicit right, instead relegating it with "the rest of them" in the Ninth Amendment.

While that sounds good, I don't really see how it is relevant? You can be detained in the US just for being near the border. Which by the way includes the entire state of Florida, despite it not sharing a land border with any other nations.

Your example is quit fitting given that it's another clear abrogation of ancient rights, specifically the right not to be arbitrarily detained.

You have the kind of opposite due to the "Chicken tax". There is a 25% tariffs on light duty trucks and vans. SO, they are shipped to the US configured as passenger vehicles and then stripped after arriving in the US to a cargo configuration.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax#Circumventing_the_...

The difficulty is that this idea is not new and the regulations are written with that in mind.

Chicken tax trucks have entered the chat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

There's still a huge amount of regulation before those trucks get onto the road. Just trying to import a bag of parts and then reassembling in the US while claiming it's a kit car is the oldest trick in the book. It's an instant trip to the crusher every time.

For a while Ford was importing Turkey manufactured small vans with seats in the back as passenger vehicles, immediately un-bolting and shredding the seats after they'd arrived at the US port, and selling them for their real intended purpose (small electrical/telecom/plumbing/other trades services vans).

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