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Comment by bhickey | Hacker News Reader

The manufacturer should be jointly liable for producing a defective vehicle.

I don't think you can legally sell a new small vehicle in the US, so the root cause is legislation that prevents this. I believe that if you could legally produce kei sized vehicles in the US, there would be a massive market for it, especially in urban environments. And I'm sure US manufacturers would be happy to sell them to all comers.

Edit: Basically any car from Suzuki would be a hit in the US: https://www.suzukiauto.co.za/new-cars

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

They are perfectly legal to sell. There's just little demand and most manufacturers have discontinued sales.

I own a not-quite-that small car and the manufacturer discontinued US sales for the same reason - the lack thereof. That's why the Smart Fortwo discontinued sales in the US in 2019. The US market for good or for bad just does not want small cars. Many manufacturers are even dropping their sedans for sales reasons; e.g., Ford dropped the Fusion and Focus.

I don't really agree anymore. These massive vehicles on the road means that suddenly everyone has developed a very real intuition for F=ma and they're all competing in a sort of arms race to survive car crashes. Wanna improve your odds of surviving? Get the biggest fucking thing you can.

This was actually my father's arguement when I turned 16. He hypothesized that I was a new driver and therefore more likely to be involved in a crash, but if I wanted to survive a crash I needed a larger vehicle than the other one involved in the collision.

I didn't much care either way, but I do still consider this when comparing new vehicles.

Better to kill than be killed?

Yes. Typically. Unless you have some compelling reason to sacrifice, it's typically a safer bet to be alive having killed some other random driver than be dead. Especially when the perspective is a parent ensuring their genetic pool.

I thought it was just that you get hit with fines if your vehicle doesn't have a minimum mpg fuel efficiency and it's hard to make smaller trucks and SUVs with enough efficiency to avoid the fines

The issue was the Chicken Tax which made foreign competition uncompetitive and boxed the market off so that American companies could ignore it.

SUVs get a special carve-out, and the law mandates less fuel efficiency for them than for regular cars (or what used to be regular cars). Even wonder why station wagons fell out of favour in the US?

Given that most small crossovers are labeled as “wagons”, I don’t think your theory holds much weight

not so much gets, they were designed specifically to exploit a loophole

Are small cars in any way illegal or something?

Yes, regulation in the US requires that vehicles be able to protect their occupants in pretty extreme crashes. Part of that requires a crumple zone, which means you can't fit many people inside a small car. For example, the Smart Fortwo is small, but only sits two people, while a kei vehicle of the same size would seat 4-5. I don't see much of a market for a 2-seater car.

> I don't think you can legally sell a new small vehicle in the US

This is blatantly false. See: the Mitsubishi Mirage as just one example.

The Mitsubishi Mirage might be a small car by American standards, but it seems quite a few weight classes above Kei cars.

(I don't know about erikw's claims about small cars being illegal in the US. So I don't want to express an opinion on that.)

The Honda N-box is listed as an example of a Kei car and is larger than a Mirage in some dimensions and also heavier.

Thanks!

Mitsubishi Mirage isn't a small car by EU standards. It's a typical, average sized one.

The Mazda Miata and most non-muscle car coupes are sized quite reasonably.

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