Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks
The 25-year import rule here, which bans Americans from importing vehicles from other countries unless they're 25+ years old, is just awful for those of us who would be interested in driving small, efficient foreign cars.<p>It would be great to live completely car-free, but absent major changes to how we plan our cities, it's just a sad reality that cars are a necessary ingredient to life in the vast majority of America. To cope with this, I'd love to be able to import a kei car or van from Japan, or micro-sized European city cars, or even some of the very small EV city cars that we see in China... but I just can't, unless I want an overpriced pile of scrap from the 1990s.<p>It's all so much worse when you realize that the 25-year rule is a holdover from a grey-market import scare of the mid-1980s[0]: European carmakers, namely Mercedes, BMW, and Porsche, were having trouble in the US with people importing European models of their cars. There were some valid concerns around inconsistent modifications for US safety standards, but the main issue was clearly that these grey-market imports were cheaper than buying a US model from a dealer, so profits were being missed. Instead of fixing the pricing discrepancy, they just successfully lobbied the government to enact this draconian 25-year ban, and so to this day I can't have a 2020s Japanese kei car shipped to a US port at my expense because it'd be illegal to register it.<p>[0] <a href="https://jalopnik.com/the-25-year-import-rules-history-is-more-complicated-th-1848322467" rel="nofollow">https://jalopnik.com/the-25-year-import-rules-history-is-mor...</a>