> The thing that boggles my mind his how this 25-year-old grandfathering thing works. I think it's totally fair to allow old vehicles on the road that may not comply with today's standards, but did comply when they were originally made and titled (in the US). But there's no good reason we need to allow people to import old, unsafe vehicles like this.

If safety was a primary concern for U.S. regulators, large consumer SUVs and trucks would not exist in their current form. As of ~2019 (the last such study I know of) trucks killed occupants of other vehicles at 2.5x the rate of cars and "SUVs" (an increasingly useless category as it includes everything from small unibody crossovers to enormous body-on-frame Canyonero-style monstrosities). I am not aware of any comparable headline figure for how pedestrians fare against them but I would put money on their pedestrian safety performance also being atrocious.

They are quite literally an atrocity against the American people, a public health hazard of the first order, and our regulators evidently do not give one single shit.

Through that lens the opinion you've expressed here—that people should not be allowed to drive cars that make them more unsafe—is extremely ironic, because the semiliterate chuds who support the unrestrained escalation of larger and deadlier and larger and deadlier vehicles on public roads make the exact opposite "argument" as a justification of why they should be allowed: freedom, personal responsibility, etcetera. I elide the details because it's mad-libs anyway, not any kind of coherent position unless one discards the notion of a social contract entirely.

I'm not suggesting you yourself hold an opinion like that, but it seems a uniquely American dichotomy that one is not allowed to drive a car that makes oneself more likely to die, but there is absolutely no problem with driving a car that's several times more likely to kill somebody else.