All that said, $25k isn't cheap when you can get a basic Polaris SXS for $15k. It might not be street legal in many states, but much of the usage is going to be on private property.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Side-by-side_(vehicle)

The same places small golf carts, Cushman carts, or side-by-sides are being used already.

Toyota - and Japan in general - has a helluva trade relationship with the US, but that's effectively all Detroit knows how to beat the world at anymore and they love the margins on their truck portfolios, to the point that they considered sedans and most coupes to be too thin to warrant continued production.

That is NOT a lot of people involved.

I worked golf course landscaping during some summers in college and drove Gators, which did their job well. But they certainly weren't any relief from being out in the sun all day. This Scion minitruck has heat and air conditioning. And locking doors. So it'll be a respite from the outdoors, as well as a secure (well, as secure as any car) place to leave your personal items.

Right now, if you want certain things in a truck in the US and Canada, you must buy a full-size, even if they could be offered as features on smaller trucks that would not justify the same MSRP in the minds of customers. I think this is part of why we don't see any real competition from GM or Stellantis to the Ford Maverick almost three years on. GM would rather you buy a mid- or full-size truck, and Stellantis doesn't offer anything other than full-size Rams.

IOW, it needs to keep the 25mph speed limiter to qualify as a low speed vehicle, even in Colorado.

But rolling back or adding exemptions for small trucks is political suicide despite the clear environmental benefits.

CARB only nudges manufacturers, but the market’s own purchase preferences are doing the big push.

Perhaps the biggest nudge is that gasoline is undertaxed. Consumers will never see a reason to stop driving a 18-25mpg truck when gas being less than $5 a gallon is considered a “high” price. The gas tax hasn’t kept up with inflation.

I don’t love the ford F-150 for being a monster truck, but consider this: with the right configuration it sears 6 adults comfortably, plus having a bed for cargo. Families legitimately replace minivans and other family vehicles with it, plus it can tow and haul being the body on frame truck that it is.

Either way, if the Maverick gets 37MPG already, seems like it’s not that much of an ask to get it to 67mpg.

If Slate can make a $25,000 EV truck I don’t see why the Ford can’t do the same.

I see a lot of arguments around the idea that these mpg figures are unrealistic or unattainable by the auto industry, but in reality they are just pushing the industry to make changes they are already capable of making but don’t want to bother with.

    > If Slate can make a $25,000 EV truck I don’t see why Ford can’t do the same.

With inflation running so hot in the US, I will be very surprised if they can keep their promise for a 25K USD base model truck, and maintain it for any significant period of time. I found the preorder agreement here: https://www.slate.auto/en/terms/preorder

    > 1. Preorder
    > By submitting your Preorder and paying the non-refundable deposit (the “Preorder Deposit”), you are securing a firm time slot for the production of a Truck. If you choose to place a Preorder prior to being assigned a delivery window, you will be assigned one when available. This Agreement does not constitute a purchase agreement for a Truck and you are not obligated to purchase a Truck. You will be required to enter into a separate Vehicle Purchase Agreement closer to the time of delivery in order to purchase a Truck and you will be able to select any accessories and configure your Truck at that time. The Vehicle Purchase Agreement will include the final price sheet for your configured Truck and may be with a separate Slate entity. Your Preorder becomes effective upon your acceptance of these Terms and your payment of the Preorder Deposit.

I created a poll for this topic here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50448128

The Ford Fathom isn't that far off.

Also, it's Corporate Average Fuel Economy. Not Model Average Fuel Economy. So those 150k or so Mavericks have to offset the to the like 600k or so F-Series pickups being sold with 400+HP motors.

Ford has never paid a CAFE fine, despite selling predominantly gas guzzling pickups, SUVs, and having its only car being a sports car. This is because of the aforementioned credits they get for flex fuel support, etc.

All while the Maverick has a bed that probably can't properly move a couch.

You probably can't really fit a couch on the back of a kei truck either, but it's ok because they're cute.

[1] https://www.vehiclesizes.com/compare/3771-7714/ford-maverick...

The appeal of a Maverick is that it’s a normal family vehicle that drives just like a passenger car while having a bed where you can put dirty stuff.

I know I see a lot of light duty fleets that switched from Rangers to F-150s only because the Ranger was discontinued and there were no small trucks to switch to.

These are businesses that need a 6 foot bed for gear, but don't need to have more than one seat (but two is fine), and would like fuel efficiency and dollar efficiency.

Some of them went to work vans, but nobody is selling those right now either.

Americans collectively purchase over 1 million trucks a year. They come in all kinds of different form factors from work truck with unpainted bumpers to 700HP supercharged dune runners, there are massive couches on wheels with interior made from saddle leather, to trucks pushing 1000ft-lbs to torque. There are EVs trucks with 400 miles of range and crossovers with the hatch turned into a tiny bed. There's even a Jeep Wranger with a bed (Gladiator).

If there's a significant market for a truck niche, it's covered. Trucks are far and away the most diverse segment of the US auto market. If manufactures killed of the truck you want, it's because they apparently can't find 1,999 other people to buy that trim.

They do not come in all form factors. Compact trucks are missing.

> If manufactures killed of the truck you want, it's because they apparently can't find 1,999 other people to buy that trim.

If that were true, Ford wouldn't have stopped selling the Ranger in the US. They stopped making them in December 2011.

Yearly sales [2] were

   2005  120,958
   2006   92,420
   2007   72,711
   2008   65,872
   2009   55,600
   2010   55,364
   2011   70,832
   2012   23,848

Canadian sales were about 20k a year, with 2011 and 2012 combining to hit 20k-ish. [2]

If it's not sales, and it's not competition (because all of the competition stopped servicing this market, too), it's because CAFE forced us to buy bigger or older trucks.

[1] https://carfigures.com/us-market-brand/ford/ranger#year-sale...

[2] https://carfigures.com/canada-market-brand/ford/ranger#year-...

The Maverick is a compact truck. It's slightly shorter and somewhat wider than the Ranger.

It's specifically only the 2-seat compact truck form factor that's missing.

Substitute "car" for "truck" in that statement, and you have exactly the justification Ford and GM had for not building the first minivans in the late '70s.

Ford even had all the detailed market research that said you could move ~700K units of such a vehicle per year; but disbelieved it, "b/c if that were truly the case, GM would've made those already."

Hal Sperlich took that information with him to Chrysler after Henry Ford II fired him, and the first thing he did at Chrysler was to convince John Riccardo to develop the K-car, which provided the parts Sperlich would need for the minivan a few years later. Despite the staggering profits generated by the first minivans, it took GM another six years, and Ford another ten to begin selling a competitive product.

Point is, don't assume every addressable profitable niche is actually being addressed.

I think that the amount a small truck was valued by American consumers, including business consumers, is vastly overstated.

The reality is that most American businesses don't see any downside to the large size of the F-150. To them, a parking space is a parking space. The fact that you had parking restrictions probably makes you something of an outlier in the US market.

The single-row seating for whatever reason is particularly unpopular. I suspect that more people really want to be able to fit more than 3 people in the truck, and the additional benefit of the crew cab is locked interior storage.

Anyone else who needs a long bed can also buy a van, and in my area I see way more businesses with work vans than with pickup trucks. If you put your stuff in a pickup truck it can't be locked and secured, and it's exposed to the elements. That's a no-go if you're an electrician, plumber, HVAC technician, etc.

I'm not sure what you mean when you say that work vans aren't being sold right now:

Ford Transit

Mercedes-Benz Sprinter

Chevy Express/GMC Savana

RAM ProMaster

Certainly the smaller work vans like the Transit Connect and Nissan NV200 are no longer with us, and that's unfortunate.

It might actually be, but I always assumed it was carbon emissions.

> As an intentionally low-volume, niche vehicle, the KEI-01 will initially be offered through a fleet-focused pilot program to help the company learn how it can best serve U.S. customers and use cases.

https://pressroom.toyota.com/toyota-says-okei-to-america-int...

I do hope they're able to build on this, and maybe offer left-hand-drive and a more reasonable top speed eventually.

This is exploiting the existing LSV classification to bypass the chicken tax that limits the current market to old used imports. It will be easy enough to mod them for higher speeds on farms.

There's sizeable demand for people who want to be able to do runs to the bigbox stores for garden and DIY renovation supplies and store it the rest of the time.

To me, that seems like the city is entrapping its citizens to make up for a lack of revenue, when the data clearly shows the speed limit should probably be adjusted. But no, they move to develop a lottery system to send the infractions.

The only reason for the speed to trend downwards is the increasing threat of a ticket from an automated system that cannot be reasoned with. A real cop generally isn't going to ticket me for going 5, maybe even 10 over a posted 40MPH zone unless they fished me for something else during the the stop. Flow of traffic is everything.

The cameras in Ontario issued an order of magnitude fewer tickets than yours. The highest volume cameras issued about 100 a day.

The lottery system they're building to support the capacity issue is going to calculate weights based on the most egregious speeders, which I guess is nice...

The problem is a cultural one. Most people interpret a speed limit of N as "I should go N+10" (or something like that). If we remove speed limits, the majority of people would end up driving at unsafe speeds. People will always break speed limits unless they are set at that unsafe level.

[[citation needed]]

(particularly section 2 "Limitations of the 85th Percentile Rule for Setting Speed Limits")

I'll admit that "the majority" could be an overstatement, perhaps I should have said "enough people to be dangerous"

I come from the position that on a dry, well-maintained, and straight road, with no traffic, I think even 100 mph is a safe speed. I assume people like you that even consider 80 mph to be unsafe are assuming there's significant traffic on curved roads that might not have the best maintenance. I also assume you're driving a large truck or SUV which has abysmal handling, whereas I'm used to the tighter handling of my Subaru BRZ.

Generally, I don't think speed causes crashes, it just makes crashes worse. So if I'm coming from assumptions above, then crashes basically won't happen.

Add some traffic? Then the safe speed depends on their discipline. Are drivers keeping right except when passing? Or is some asshole playing "traffic cop" and camping the left lane at the speed limit, or even below it?

Make roads narrower. Add more bends and lateral shifts. Plant trees along the road to obstruct sight lines. Build roads so that only speeds below the speed limit are safe on them and people will travel below the speed limit.

If if the conditions actually require it, that’s when I brake. Not because a sign told me too when I may not actually need to. I feel that’s probably the most economical option.

You can slow people down by making lanes thinner, adding in-road obstacles or chicanes, removing road markings to take drivers out of their complacency and get them actively thinking, and at the slowdown at the end of a road, using tightly packed lines or rumble strips to give the impression of speed, to which they naturally react by slowing down. You also stagger junctions, and put in bends, rather than have a fast road run directly onto a slow one (or vice-versa) and then say to yourself "WELL, I DID MY PART, I MADE A NICE FAST ROAD SLAM RIGHT INTO A SLOW ONE, AND IT'S ENTIRELY ON THE DRIVERS TO NOTICE THAT STOP SIGN AND SLOW DOWN IN TIME. NOT MY PROBLEM IF THEY DON'T"

Naturally, if you do the opposite, and build a wide, long, straight road with few visual indications of how fast people are going, even the most conscientious will likely zone out and start unintentionally speeding up. It's simple human psychology.

You can't be like "human psychology's not a thing, I'll judge every single human like they're completely omniscient and perfectly rational", because there are millions of people who unintentionally do things they don't rationally want to do, every single day, because they were psychologically manipulated. Use road design to manipulate them into doing the right thing, rather than manipulate them into doing the wrong thing and then directly take money from them. That's a dark pattern.

This is not remotely close to entrapment.

Indeed, nothing forces, but things really strongly suggest through the use of psychology. The mafioso didn't force you to be a drug mule when he said he'd murder your family if you didn't. The website didn't force you to let them sell your data when they put in giant bold letters "AGREE AND ENTER" and in 5 point grey on grey "decline" -- after the website's owners ran multiple rounds A/B testing to see what was most effective at getting people to click the option that gives them free money. They didn't force you, it's all your choice buddy. You feel tricked or conned? Like you were carefully goaded into making a choice against your best interest? Well, you shouldha read the small print, sucker!

Anyway, I don't think these things are "entrapment" (meaning the police coerce you into breaking a law you wouldn't otherwise have broken), but they are sketchy, especially if the organisation in charge of enforcement also gets a cut of the fines.

Your example reminds me very much of Brookside, Alabama, where the tiny town's police department did everything in its power to bilk passing motorists for its own private enrichment. https://reason.com/2026/10/01/judge-preliminarily-blesses-1-...

> Brookside "recognizes" that its "policy of aggressive policing," which "prioritized generating revenue for the department's expansion," "likely interfered with the Town's obligation to administer justice equally under law," "undermined the public's trust in the justice system," and "raised serious constitutional concerns under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment."

Uh, yeah it is? This is literally textbook coercion through threat of murder. I'm not sure how this is relevant to people who don't pay attention to speed limits and speed, though.

Also, the example in your linked article isn't even related to speed limits:

> According to the lawsuit, Coleman "was following three or four car lengths behind" her boyfriend's car. But Sellers claimed she was "tailgating." He also claimed to smell marijuana, which supposedly justified ordering Coleman out of her car and handcuffing her.

You keep designing deadly streets and roads that encourage speeding, you keep producing and marketing bigger and bigger more dangerous vehicles... Ads about power and speed... And then turn around and blame people as being solely responsible?

No, the overall system is a direct cause of crashes and deaths as well.

At the societal level these things are numbers games. If you don't want people going 60 on a road don't build a road where normal conditions cause that to be a comfortable and safe speed.

I open up because no one the was on the road, and immediately get blue flashing lights in my mirrors.

Turns out this "six lane highway" was considered the equivalent of an alleyway and the speed limit was 40.

Agree that the lottery is silly though. I would give people a free hit a year. You get a warning saying, this one is free if you don't break the limit again. If you do, pay both fines.

Also index the fines to income.

We can kill speeding. It's just a matter of resolve and time. It'd save a lot of lives.

"Quiet down you gangly bunch of blowhard bollards!"

That just felt satisfying. If I could channel John Cleese (the indignant version of course), the above line would be perfect.

Regardless of his mode of transit if he's going below the prevailing speed and avoiding taking opportunities to let others pass he deserves to hear about it in a not nice way.

Not that it's applicable here but it's doubly true so if he could simply go faster and conform to traffic norms but chooses not to (this is why a speed limit following Prius catches more shit than a laden truck that can only go that fast).

It's only "blocking" because the drivers think the bike is too slow. Which is because they want to break the law themselves and speed dangerously. It's pretty bogus.

It's a work truck not a Prius with a Coexist sticker.

If you drive significantly slower than the flow of traffic it can create a hazard for other drivers.

Generally speaking, much of driving is predicting what other drivers will do. If you behave significantly differently than other cars you do raise the chances of an accident.

Most cops will likely even pull you over for that.

I’ve seen more than one person try to merge onto a highway at 45 MPH and every time they very nearly caused an accident.

Speed differential based ticketing. That guy who stops on the ramp when traffic is going 60 is teeing up the same potential ~40mph accident as the guy trying to weave through the same traffic at 100.

Reverse the default rules of rear ending liability in merging zones as the cherry on top.

We really should reverse the rules of default liability for rear ending in merge zones.

I'm sure there's some kinks to iron out but I think my plan is solid.

They should probably do that: sell a variant without doors and with knobby tires as a UTV.

After that, when vehicle sizes start trending down towards reasonable, we can look at getting speeds up without reducing overall safety.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SUV#United_States

The idea to introduce light trucks in passenger-car shape to get around pollution limits was the car manufacturers' idea. However, the US public ran with it and bought because of the perceived higher safety and social status that comes with driving a larger, heavier vehicle than everyone else. And they continue to buy to attempt to one-up each other even though the pollution limits now apply to SUVs as well as smaller passenger cars.

I don't buy cars based on their pollution capabilities like some Captain Planet villain. Maybe other consumers are different.

Other commenters in this thread explain that they own Kei imports and drive them faster.

Step 1: Drive to Home Depot and buy your items.

Step 2: Rent a truck at Home Depot, load your items into to, drive it home and unload it.

Step 3: Return the truck to Home Depot and drive home.

That seems easier than buying and storing a vehicle to me, but I’m just a dumb construction project manager.

You could even skip the truck rental and going to to store step and have everything delivered directly to your house.

Whether you feel safe doing so is a separate question, of course.

https://afdc.energy.gov/laws/5954

This little truck could do a lot more than 25 mph if it were allowed to do so. Not saying that would be safe, and I'd not want to ever put one on a busy freeway, but for getting around most urban cities in the US it's fine as-is but would be even better if the limit was ~40 mph.

As a result we don't get "right sized" trucks like the kei or more efficient farm vehicles like the hilux.

They are not fun cars, they should be cheap and disposable.

The MSRP for this in japan is less than $10,000,$6000 for the base model:

https://toyota.jp/pixistruck/

It's going to go here for what, $15,000? $25,000? Better than buying a 25 yr old one for $10,000 from a used dealer lot that has no parts or real mechanic trained on them but at that price point..

a Mavrick is better.

The amazon truck is better.

And yeah, absolutely not comfortable.

Toyota selling them for $25k is parasitism. The idea of selling a cheap truck is apparently impossible with their cost structures. (Worse, if it succeeds it will ruin the Japanese market)

The best outcome is that this is a mild success and America gets a second generation shit version for 40 or 50k that has been fattened and rendered worthless, much like the second generation XB. (Hopefully the second generation is on some slop tier SUV platform so it doesn't wreck the economics of the Japanese market.)

US roads are built for much, much higher speeds. Kei cars purposefully give up safety with the caveat that they’re only used on low speed roadways, and Japan designs their roads with the intention of these vehicles being acceptably safe in that context.

On intercity highways in Japan you are driving next to as large trucks as anywhere I've driven.

IIUC a typical "real" Japanese kei truck can manage 60-70 mph easily, if not comfortably. That's more than enough to hang with traffic on the vast majority of American roads, and nobody sane is using these things as long distance transportation. So the "they're too slow" argument is clearly bunk.

That leaves the safety angle. I can't help noticing that motorcycles are still legal, or did I miss something? Anyway, it's very emblematic of the American approach to road safety that some small, light vehicles are uncertifiable on safety grounds, but the sizes and weights of personal vehicles are allowed to grow in unbounded fashion. There is clearly no safety issue with getting groceries and picking your kid up from school in something that weighs most of 10K lbs and has such dogshit sight lines that you could run over a whole school bus's worth of kids in a crosswalk and hardly notice.

Freedom? Personal responsibility? Not quite---you can make a choice to endanger other road users, but never yourself! Unless you ride a motorcycle, in which case that's okay.

Perhaps an attempt to balance both.

Working class buys cheapest available <insert product here>. Allow sale of new vehicles without seatbelts, airbags, etc. and that becomes the attractive thing to lease (assuming it can be insured). Allow, say… uninspected beef & dairy products instead and if those savings are passed on, that’ll be purchased by low-income folks too.

Motorcycles have a built-in discouragement from the cost-optimizing behavior: lack of those two extra wheels.

>Not quite---you can make a choice to endanger other road users, but never yourself!

Would be open to ways regulate enormous vehicles which’re dangerous to the public outside their cabins. Keep taxpayers alive + out of hospitals they might not be able to afford (cost passed on to me).

But, (again) since you mentioned it---"new vehicles without seatbelts, airbags, etc." is a misrepresentation of modern kei vehicles. Kei cars sold new today have seatbelts, crumple zones, airbags, ABS, AEB, and so on. They perform well in crashes for their size---sure, they are small cars, but they aren't a scheme to foist unsafe-by-design shitboxes on people who can't afford something safer.

More recent kei pickups still use the cabover design which necessarily limits your available crumple volume, but even those have the modern safety systems. The imports you see in the US are 25+ years old, which affects their safety outcomes in the way you would expect. People here buy them despite the age and import rigamarole (arguably a terrible value on paper) because there is demand.

---

The Smart Fortwo is probably the closest thing to a modern kei car we've had in the US outside of imports. IIUC they made it work with our regs by designing to them from the start, but in practice its safety outcomes were apparently pretty similar to kei cars in Japan, and exactly what you'd expect: decent performance in single vehicle crashes, but they suffer in crashes with larger vehicles. They weren't sold on the cheap to lure cost-conscious buyers (neither are kei cars in Japan), and ultimately I guess Americans just didn't want to buy them. But they were solid runabouts for city dwellers and didn't feel unsafe to drive in that context.

tl;dr: If there was some viable scheme to sell new-ish kei vehicles in the US, I would not be terribly worried about the scenario you describe, and IMO implying some equivalence between e.g. a hypothetical moderate regulatory carve-out for such vehicles with abandonment of beef and dairy product inspections is utterly ridiculous.

You seem to be better at comparisons than me:

One note on selling new vehicles without safety features: that is an example of what might be made without regulation and what would definitely be purchased on both the new and later the used market by those who can't afford more.

On the beef inspection point, I wanted a random example to drive home that poverty stinks and in every single product category the absolute cheapest SKU has plenty of buyers. You well likely are able to offer a better example I could have thrown out?

Ex. There is no visible difference between Germanies highways (no speed limit) and Switzerland with 120kmh max

The US tends to combine relatively high speed (45-55mph) with a large number of driveways and conflict points.

Many other countries do a better job delineating which roads are meant for getting between towns and cities and which roads are low speed streets that are often shared with pedestrians, cars, bicycles, e-bikes.

Another topic worth doing research on is the concept of traffic calming. Wide, straight roads encourage high speed.

As for the imports, I saw one of these 90s-era right-hand drive kei trucks at a parking lot a few months ago and talked with the owner. He lived in Boston, said it was super easy to park. Speed maxed out at 70 mph, which is fine for local trips but maybe not for long highway trips.

For people in jurisdictions that allow 30 year old truck imports, and are interested in getting one, there are other countries that use such trucks and have left-hand drive. Taiwan has models from CMC and Suzuki, and I believe South Korea also makes them.

I also maintain that 'loud pipes save lives' (lol), and being bright yellow does also add a little to it's visibility on the road.

If you're stopped at a red light behind a car or truck and someone on their phone plows into the back of your car there's no driving defensively to protect you. A modern car might save you. If the fun of driving a lightweight car is worth the safety issues that's fine, but you can not just drive defensively and solve those issues.

    > Kei cars are designed for cities.

I mean, "most private drivers" in Japan is a _tiny_ subset of people, no? Isn't a large part of that basically just rich people showing off?

Yes, like most other rich countries, cars are a status symbol. Kei car/truck basically says you are middle class or below. Regular size car/van is the flex, especially German cars.

All kinds of people who grew up in Tokyo are well aware that cars are required outside of a few big cities in Japan. Examples: (a) You have relatives that live in the countryside. (b) You take a family trip to the countryside for hiking or onsen/ryokan or skiing. (c) You watch NHK (public TV) about a small village.

I often get questions about train and bus coverage and they are surprised that you need a car in 2nd tier cities like Kobe, Nagoya or Matsumoto. They ‘know’ that having a car is convenient, they didn’t _understand_ that it was a necessity.

Don’t be that guy that thinks your experience of Japan is the only one.

Funniest thing my brother has sent me pictures of while living in Japan was a local guy in Nara who drove an imported H2 Hummer.

Cost is a major factor, but so is the convenience of driving (and parking) a car with a small foot print. Plenty of people who could afford a larger car opt to go with a kei car for that reason. My family has one large luxury car and one kei car, and for a lot of day-to-day stuff the kei car gets more use because it's more convenient to park or drive on narrow streets.

So I drove it the whole way. It was god awful - noisy, slow, every corner felt like it was picking up the wheels and about to roll over. But it was hilarious and definitely possible to do a trip like that lol.

1. The article is about kei trucks, not kei cars. different things. 2. Kei is Japanese regulatory category designed for Japan. Japan is a country with quite a bit of non city places where kei .* are quite popular.

Alphard and Velfire are designed for cities, ideally dense areas where driving them isolates you from high traffic and passers by you force to move out of your way.

In terms of fuel economy (mileage), vehicles are typically tested and rated in at least two environments:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_economy_in_automobiles#Di...

* "City driving" which means surface road speeds and the typical stop-and-go of traffic lights, stop signs and other controls.

* "Highway driving" which means, sustained speeds 55mph+ without the stop-and-go. This category is usually judged more efficient, especially for ICE vehicles.

Now, there may be other design considerations, such as "city vs. rural" if they're manufacturing tractors and combines vs. sports cars. And categories beyond these I've already mentioned. So when we say the vehicle is "designed for cities", do we mean that all of these boxes have been checked? Because in terms of fuel economy, "city driving" and "highway driving" both happen in cities.

Probably about 600 lbs of soil. Nobody in the city is going to “farm supply stores”, whatever those are. If you live on a gigantic lot out in the boonies then by all means take your gigantic lifted dodge ram

Unless you mean a place for actual farm supplies, like commercial grade irrigation and stuff.

> Ps, "how much" was in reference to cubic feet. You usually don't buy soil by the pound haha.

Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer

1. Not to be confused with a feed mill which will typically only have livestock feed and in bulk for better pricing.

Eh I live in the city and last time I had 1200lb of mulch delivered it came from a depot like 10 minutes away, also in the city. Could have saved $100 by picking it up myself.

Some cities even give away mulch at recycling/compost centers.

Daihatsu sells an "agriculture special" model Hijet with a special suspension that can carry far than 600 lbs [2]. During harvesting season, it's common to see them hauling around full sacks of rice which are rated for more than twice the legal limit [3]. A lot of the trucks that get imported to the US are probably the agriculture models.

The penalties for exceeding the weight limit can actually be pretty severe. But it seems police turn a blind eye to farmers making short trips to the processing plant on public roads.

[1] https://carbuzz.com/features/jdm-gentlemans-agreement-japane...

[2] https://www.daihatsu.co.jp/lineup/truck/02_grade.htm?item=5

[3] https://store.shopping.yahoo.co.jp/truetools/tnk-kaba-1300rc...

[0]: https://www.honda.co.jp/snow/lineup/large/hsl2511-jr.html

I ordered 1 yard of soil and loaded 30 of the 60 bags. It was a short trip but it did fine.

For scale, 30bags filled it to the top of the bed almost exactly. It was also really wet im sure I was pushing well over 1k lbs

I'm unsure if you're serious.

Yeah, many vehicles do stay on the farm. Some farms are also huge, so you'll see large farm equipment using the narrow back roads to move between fields. You'll see everything from huge equipment that almost blocks the road to little ATVs, all on the same roads with the cars. Everybody around here is used to being on a 45/55 mph speed limit road and coming across vehicles that cannot go that speed. It is just part of living in rural USA.

I know a kid who drove his tractor to school once in a while, it topped out at ~20. If dad had the truck and mom had the car, what else was he gonna do? Using a low-speed vehicle in a pinch is not a new idea to these trucks' target customers. Having such a vehicle but with A/C and airbags is probably a huge selling point, actually.

[1]: https://www.deere.com/en-us/products-and-solutions/gator-uti...

If Scion limits the top speed to 25mph it'd be useless to me for our farm. I'd still rather buy an imported Honda Acty or Suzuki Carry for the price, if I'm lucky I'd find one with a hydrolic dump bed and still be cheaper than what Scion will likely be able to sell this for.

I have zero concerns about the speed governor. That's gonna end up being a flash mod you can do yourself in your garage, I guarantee it. Worst case scenario, someone will start selling ECUs on eBay or something.

Well thats a regulatory issue in the US. Without load, the truck without limiter will hapily do 50mph, and less happily 60+, although it might take you some time to get there.

http://archive.today/rLNx6

Results from crash testing of the Japanese model aren't great (scored 1 out of 5; higher is better), but since results are only comparable to similar weight vehicles, we can't compare to bigger cab-overs directly, only to passenger Kei cars, where some reach 4 out of 5, with a few scoring the full 5.

And that's how to get these banned.

People reflash these to remove the speed governor, then drive them on regular roads. These things hold up traffic, piss people off, who then complain to law enforcement. The police do nothing about it so the issue gets raised to state and federal legislators, who do take action.

You can get away with a lot, so long as you don't bother anyone. The EPA didn't crack down on diesel tuners until coal rolling became enough of an issue that people complained about the lack of enforcement.

IDK what kind of gearing this gimped version will come with, but it apparently has the same 660cc engine as the "real" Japanese version that can do 70+ mph. That's not a vehicle that's going to hold up traffic by being too slow, unless it's camping in the left lane on the freeway.

Just how cars that can be hacked to eliminate pollution controls are banned?

Oh wait. That doesn't happen. The individual that does the hacking can get in trouble; the company? Not so much.

Another company that deserves plaudits for the same is mutiny.fm who are building an open source kei truck out of a disused factory in Detroit. Similar limitations as the new scion, but aimed at people for whom repairability and modifiability are virtues in a vehicle

I don't know if you are affiliated with Telo or just find them fascinating as a product segment, but a starting price of 42k USD is the thing that "stands out" the most for me about their product. Otherwise, I do like the segment - but this pricing is offensive.

They aren't comfortable to drive at all (although just having A/C at all on a hot summer day in the field is a godsend), and I wouldn't want to do longer trips in one - although you certainly could in a pinch.

It seems like Toyota/Scion is just testing the waters here, and I'm not sure how successful they'll be. But I hope there is a future for kei trucks in the US.

From a US perspective I guess. Here in NZ, the 2011 Ford Ranger was already amongst the largest and tallest vehicles on the road (excluding actual trucks and buses of course).

The Toyota eCVT is an engineering marvel[1].

The hybrid power train is simpler than a regular transmission and made of more durable parts.

The clutch itself might not have to disappear for more fine grained power delivery, the new Ferrari clutch-by-wire is a similar bit of a few hall sensors talking to the ECU.

You can build a simulacrum of a manual low-mode transmission without needing to use it constantly in stop-go traffic or while sliding backwards on loose dirt.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2L5VOtf47Y

I don't think it's possible to deliver a Toyota hybrid system or Ferarri-style drive-by-wire clutch at that price point. Although maybe in the future we could see EV kei trucks at a comparable price.

Personally I think it's worth spending slightly more for a manual transmission - although some of my buddies laughed at me for buying an automatic kei truck (my license doesn't actually permit me to drive a manual on public roads). I think at this point though automatic transmission sales probably exceed manual transmission sales.

[1] https://www.daihatsu.co.jp/lineup/truck/02_grade.htm?item=6

So while I'm not sure about the origin of manual vs automatic licenses specifically, it's not really surprising in the broader context of Japan's strict stance on driving.

In practice it means if you want to drive manual, you need to take the driving test in a manual. But seeing as how only 13% of foreigners pass Japan's practical driving test on the first attempt, and I hadn't driven manual in years, I wasn't looking to make things any more difficult for myself.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-road-incident...

[2] https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16392895

Deaths per X km driven would be a more useful statistics. Japan has such a well functioning public transport system which just leads to people driving less.

Road fatalities per 10,000 registered vehicles were also higher in the US, at 0.4 in Japan vs 1.3 in the US.

Japan does have a significantly larger share of deaths coming from pedestrians (36%) and cyclists (15%) vs the us (18.2% vs 2.9%, respectively) - which is one of the challenges of driving in Japan. You constantly have to be on the lookout for pedestrians and cyclists coming from any direction, often on narrower streets with obstructed visibility.

[1] https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/united-states-r...

[2] https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/japan-road-safe...

Even worse was when I lived in the countryside and I'd try to go for walks down the road and motorbikes absolutely maxing out would rocket past me not giving a shit about who or what was on the road. Kinda funny looking back how the most dangerous place I lived was the Japanese countryside

Bonus points: near the end of the walk there was a two-lane road that I had to walk half a km to get to the nearest crossing for, and then half a km back. Bonus points for the one car dealership in front of my destination that was only fenced off on the back side just to spite me (or, more likely, they don't want people using it as a pedestrian cut-through). The road blocking my path was constantly jammed with cars. Somehow, Nagano invented the one-lane stroad! Also, Google Maps doesn't have a good understanding of crosswalk locations, because there was a closer one on the other side that you can't really see on foot at night.

[0] I am trying to go to as many Round1s as possible to get a title in Music Diver for playing the game in a bunch of prefectures. The game gets EOS'd at the end of the month (but only in Japan, which is unheard of). Round1 likes building giant locations in the middle of nowhere with terrible transit access. I think the one in Nagoya even had a shuttle bus from the train station - which I didn't use, lol.

If you took the automatic-only test, and have an automatic-only license, you can take an additional 7 hours of lessons to remove the automatic-only restriction from your license.

It does indeed make sense, since manual requires more skill, and attempting to drive a manual on the street without knowing how could be dangerous.

Funnily enough you can visit europe, and drive here on a canadian/US license, without ever having driven a manual.

Or you’re launching towards a wall, or, worse, pedestrians, by accidentally dropping the clutch due to poor feathering control.

The US does have separate license endorsements for manual in commercial trucks.

For 80hp Suzuki Baleno and 110hp Yaris, CVT had $1200 premium, for 120hp Hyundai Verna, 6 sped TC had $1200 premium.

For dirt-simple, low-fi reliability a manual transmission is still the guy for the job. I generally buy older cars and I almost never buy a car over 150k miles unless is has an manual.

They require two generators, but they also don't require a starter motor or an alternator. Meanwhile a non-plugin hybrid only needs around 2 kWh worth of battery, which has gotten so cheap you might prefer that to a clutch replacement.

Conduit and pipe tend to come in 10 ft lengths, which only hang out the back of an 8 ft bed a little, but are a real touch-and-go experience with shorter beds.

If a manufacturer doesn't offer an 8 ft bed, what they're selling probably isn't a work truck.

10 ft pipes I can put through the rear window... would be nice if some short-bed trucks came with bed access like the Chevy Avalanche.

It does, but it's never really made sense for my use. I use the bed frequently, but like 95% of the time I don't need the tailgate down, and for the times I do, I keep some ratchet straps in the back seat.

I used the bed extender a lot, though. Moving furniture, beds, a moped, you name it.

Tonneau covers also slightly help with drag, offering slightly better mileage for fuel

https://reotrucks.com/runabout/t4x

The type of customer looking for a practical cheap truck won't take kindly to a bunch of silhouette photos and a brand nobody's ever heard of. For the subset who have a good mental radar for AI slop, this whole website just looks like a scam.

[1] https://postimg.cc/2bRfDbNp

Not saying it's impossible, because I very much want this to be a thing, but if Fisker couldn't pull it off with much more funding, I'm not going to bite until I see a real vehicle and some actual adults backing the thing.

There are no unsolved problems here. If you find one, you can take apart a Frontier, Tacoma, or Colorado from before 2005 and check how it was done then.

Yeah, it’s a safe bet.

EV's are different, the power trains there are something a 10yr old can understand. But even in EV land, Tesla spent quite a few years learning things Toyota and GM and the likes had learned half a century earlier about how cars work in the real world. Why the roll the dice at $25k for a conventional vehicle from a no name brand?

If I'm just missing the USP feel free to tell me I'm a dummy.

EVs don't make sense for trucks, especially trucks that will do actual work. I love my Tesla, but I know what it's meant for, and work ain't it.

Hell, throw in a split shift from a big rig.

Now you just need to move to Thailand. =(

https://www.nyetoyota.com/a-new-affordable-pickup-truck-is-j...

The REO Trucks might fill this niche, if they turn out not to be vaporware.

Can you lay a 4x8-foot sheet of plywood flat on the bed?

If you'll recall, around 2001 Nissan used to sell exactly what you and I both want: a light duty small pickup marketed in the US as the Frontier. That was the D22 model truck, which in NA eventually morphed into the larger (and arguably less capable due to bloat) Navara only years later. Most Americans forgot all about the D22 Frontier.

The rest of the world still has it, usually called the NP300 Hardbody. 2 or 4 seats, 4WD optional, crank windows, manual, basic as can be, and, to quote a guy I know that has one, "an absolute donkey." Across Africa, it's the work truck for the guys that show up to fix things and do work. Foreigners show up in a giant Toyota Land Cruiser. IIRC, It's being phased out in some markets, but it's ubiquitous as the truck that does work. It was the replacement in Southern Africa for the Nissan Champ, a tiny little pickup that didn't change design for 20 years.

Since the older NP300s are still on the road (Frankensteined together), they would be coming up on being importable under the 25+ year classic car exemption. That's about your only option to get a capable light-duty pickup in the US - import Africa's aged cars.

Or wait for this electric Slate pickup.

If that actually ships, it might be useful. It's also road speed capable. It's being marketed as a lifestyle accessory, not a work truck.

[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a73296422/2027-slate-ev...

The Slate pickup can be configured differently and has uses beyond that, I'm sure Slate did market research to arrive at the compromises it did, but it's a legitimate point for some.

Best as I can tell, the lackluster NP200, which looks like a Champ without the character, the Mahindra pickup, and the small Ford Ranger pickup, are filling the gap. Might not be the worst thing - the Nissan NP300 bakkies are apparently terrible for accidents. Still, not everything has to look like a Hilux!

REO[1] is supposedly coming out with a basic manual truck.

Slate is another option, but in the prototype videos I've seen it looks like it has about a 4' bed. That's too small for a utility pickup truck.

[1] https://reotrucks.com/

I own the same Ranger and my employer has a Maverick. They're functionally interchangable. Yeah the bed is theoretically shorter but they make it up in depth and IIRC it's wider. The stupid tailgate trick is fine for sheet goods and lumber. Stand them on edge if they're too heavy for that.

Modern automatics are "good enough"

I know all the ignorant fanboys are gonna screech about body on frame because they're idiots, but there's really no reason for a vehicle this light to need to be this light when you've got Sprinter vans and Toyota Highlanders (to pick two models specifically chosen to appeal to their brand of ignorance) rolling around just fine.

Idiot here o/. One very good reason to prefer a frame vehicle for a truck, besides the obvious (ruggedness, corrosion resistance, etc) is that you can more easily swap in components from heavier duty vehicles. It's not that big a project to put a real truck transmission (e.g. Eaton 9spd) in my 1998 Dodge. It would be a huge project to do it in a modern unibody vehicle. Light duty automotive transmissions do not hold up under the kinds of loads trucks put on them when they're actually being used at capacity.

Also it would be lunacy to attempt heavy towing or snow plowing without a frame.

If you just need a rolling box to move light loads of lumber around, towing a utility trailer behind your car is probably a better option than a unibody pickup truck. If you actually need a truck, I can't imagine why you'd want one without a frame.

>Light duty automotive transmissions do not hold up under the kinds of loads trucks put on them when they're actually being used at capacity.

It's not 1995. They're fine. They'll wear out sooner but they're fine. 200k instead of 300k. By virtue of being able to handle lead footed stoplight to stoplight driving the transmission, cooling, etc, etc, is in pretty good shape to handle the sizes and speeds of things you'd want to tow with a Maverick. Nobody is hammering down in a Maverick towing god knows how much up a grade or plowing so it really doesn't matter. Towing loads on the body are essentially a non-issue since every modern hitch is engineered well enough to spread the load enough the vehicle can handle it.

As far as suspension goes they handle ~2k in the bed just fine (done it) so there's some implied capacity for tongue weight there even if it's not 1:1. I can't speak to the Hyundai Santa Cruz.

> It's not that big a project to put a real truck transmission (e.g. Eaton 9spd) in my 1998 Dodge.

It would be the exact same sized project in a unibody vehicle that used a longitudinal transmission. But you wouldn't have the easy button of just doing a body lift to make things fit, you'd actually need to dick with the tunnel and firewall and whatnot to do it the right way.

Regardless, that's not a use case the OEM needs to support.

>If you just need a rolling box to move light loads of lumber around, towing a utility trailer behind your car is probably a better option than a unibody pickup truck. If you actually need a truck, I can't imagine why you'd want one without a frame.

A utility trailer works fine if you don't actually need to do anything on short notice. You never have them when you need them. Backing them into dumb spaces can be a pain. The threshold at which things need to be tied down is lower. It's just not as elegant of a solution as a pickup box.

At worst it'll be a checkbox in the software.

The governor purely exists for US legal reasons

I'd love to have something like an uncapped Kei truck available new but I'm also really reticent to just open up crash safety requirements for cars because it'll get used for a lot more than just the Kei trucks.

If you want a second hand Kei truck market you're up against hundreds of exporters all bidding at auctions for the best ones who are paying with USD.

Kei trucks are so dang useful looking.

I hope they make an electric one.

There are a bunch of YouTube videos reviewing them.

A 600 pound weight limit (including passengers!!) and 25 MPH limit are both deal-breakers for my use case, and I can't see anyone around where I live buying one. Maybe there is a big enough niche market on the commercial side?

When I bought my Scion, after finishing the transaction, I asked the salesman: "It's obvious who these cars are being marketed to. But who buys them?"

His answer: "Old tightwads like you."

Maybe in Belgium or Netherlands. But America? With it’s landmass, this is dead on arrival

It seems like they just reached into the "previously granted trademark" bin and pulled out a random name.

It's the VW Microbus all over again.

Recently almost bought an '06 xB toaster except it was a Series limit edition with the special paint job. It had chipped paint on the hood from rocks and the owner said his insurance would total it instead of repainting because the paint was so expensive.

You were always allowed to import small kei trucks in the US if you didn't take them on public streets - you were just never allowed to register them. You would regularly see them in zoos or in manufacturing yards - in LHD to boot!

It's a little disappointing, they are basically going to be treated legally like a golf cart and electronically limited. An identical imported model would go all the way up to 55mph on the same drivetrain.

It's all limited by the US maddening approach to traffic safety - a 3 ton pickup with 6 foot pedestrian blind spots gets top safety ratings, but a small truck going 30mph is illegal.

They're great for local hauling or a short commute, but impractical as a general purpose vehicle due to limited range and speed (the type I was looking at, anyway). Top speed is 40mph and they're legal to drive only on roads with speed limit 35mph or lower, and range with the 10kwh battery pack is around 40 miles iirc. But, if you only use it a few miles per day on average and park it outside, putting solar panels on the roof means it literally never needs fuel or charging. The stopper for me was being unable to drive on the freeway.

(Yes: The passenger's legs.)

Let's see here:

LSV: Okay, whatever the market is limited to farm equipment and campuses but the agrijeep was a success despite that

Automatic: WHY. Cost? Maintenance? All so Paul Blatt can drive the thing without picking up the automotive equivalent of riding a bike.

Fleet sales only: You are fucking kidding. A lot of fleets buy exclusively American either by obligation or by habit. You lock out half the market for this thing right here.

28k MSRP: Dead on arrival, Slate, a Ford Maverick, the Fathom if it either releases. You are objectively paying more for less.

How Toyota. How could you fuck this one up so bad? I'm almost convinced that Toyota has introduced this simply to manufacture consent for America's lack of compacts. Make the absolutely least appealing package possible and then go "Oh well! Americans only want Toyota Tundra ;)"

But compared to the comparable electric ones in China, which are even cheaper and way more feature loaded, these choices and the new Scion are so, so far behind. I'm currently in Taiwan and was just in Japan last week, and in both places it's like stepping 30 years back in time.

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

btw, there is a Californian company called Telo Truck that wants to sell a Kei-ish truck but as an EV cab forward. I say Kei-ish because it is 152 inch long (they compare it to a Mini on their website), where as Kei trucks can max be 134 inch, it gives me the same shape and vibes.

If the company ever makes it to production, then i guess that could be a real option.

That is my new, personal record. Haven't had a site wanting to sell my data to this many parties yet.

Maintenance is challenging (entirely DIY, as no shops around here care to touch it), but getting most parts has been fairly straightforward, just slow if we have to ship them from Japan.

The Kei van format is fantastic, and we've even installed seatbelts for the rear fold-down seats and we drive our kids around in it. I can't seem to get it higher than about 60mph, but that's scary fast for this vehicle. We don't ever really need to take it on the highway. It's so simple to park, visibility and features are amazing, even for an older vehicle. Ahead of it's time! I would love to get a pickup version, but don't have an excuse for that yet.

A kei truck is about the least American-market thing ever

Dealbreaker. Too bad they couldn't get it legal on 45mph or less. It would literally open up 99% of non-highway routes.

New benchmark just dropped

So it's basically useless to the American market outside of the farming and rural campgrounds communities.

We already import thousands of Kei trucks a year for farm truck use and those imported trucks can even have their speed limiters removed to go 55mph depending on the state laws, this is pointless.