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.
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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?
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).