Massachusetts 'Reviewing' Kei Car Ban After Uproar over Canceled Registrations
thedrive.com
thedrive.com
Every time I ask about it people jump all over “they aren’t safe on the highway”. Okay cool. If you own a golf cart in SD, it’s illegal to drive it on the highway. Problem solved right? I mean we have mopeds, motorcycles, literal bicycles sharing all these streets too. Certainly golf carts and kei trucks can have a special license plate for non highway vehicles?
I wonder if we are headed towards of path of two different road systems with ebikes, golf cars, bikes, etc on a separate roadway.
They're not really practical.
Then they get rear ended by a one ton SUV or even just hit a pole at 25 mph and it’s fatalities all around.
Agreed a separate golf cart/e-bike line may make sense, but you need wide adoption to justify that much dedicated lanes. People won’t necessarily buy a several thousand dollar vehicle just to run local errands, especially in Boston when it’s a 2 season vehicle
Or, we could apply a 30mph max speed limit everywhere.
Your line of reasoning appears to be "if one person can die in a hypothetical situation we must ban it" when I think the reality is "if the net savings in lives and energy and costs overall are right, we can tolerate some risk"
The NHTSA might have a view. P.J. O'Rourke wrote about them quite nicely: a federal agency staffed by people who love cars, dealing with lardass drivers who keep stepping on the wrong pedal and want to blame it on Toyota.
Creating “the Villages” nationwide where every neighborhood is only trafficked by small low speed vehicles would be great, but people don’t want to invest storage and money into a secondary vehicle of such limited use. Maybe a neighborhood ringed by garages where people store their long distance vehicles, and integrally self driving golf carts putter people around to schools, stores, and cafes? If they need to leave, grab a cart and head to the garage ring?
I love urbanism and spent about half a decade car free (then kids really made that way more difficult), and getting cars off the roads in neighborhoods or even towns would be astounding
Now you would have to worry about delivery trucks, trash collection etc?
If being in a golf cart is too dangerous, why do we allow pedestrians to walk around without full body armour?
Isn't that also making the case that one ton SUV aren't safe either? At least in a golf cart you're putting your own life at risk, not others. Presumably there are less pedestrians/cyclists/motorcyclists killed by golf carts.
This seems so dubious. Safe for whom? If we're talking about the driver, how are motorcycles legal? If we're talking about other highway users, then I'd rather be hit by a kei car than a lifted mega-pickup with wheels sticking out 6" beyond the body.
Obviously.
> how are motorcycles legal?
They're popular with a fairly large portion of the American public who view them as a lifestyle they are committed to, banning them for any reason would be political suicide.
Speaking of which, it blows my mind that it is legal to lift your truck.
I've been in an even more remote part of California, where I was riding my UTV for a few hundred yards on a 55 MPH paved road to get back to my car/trailer after riding in the dirt all day. It was California State Route 182 in Mono County (population density: 4.2/sq mi). A local sheriff saw me and followed me to my car. I was certain I was getting a ticket. He started by asking where I'd ridden and what my favorite parts were. Based on that, he shared some other places nearby that I might like to ride and told me which paved roads I can use to get between them. As he left, he told me to have fun.
"Minimum speed 40 MPH. 3 wheels or more requires airbags."
The motivation will be money. The normalisation of small, inexpensive cars would have a serious impact on the American car industry, which prefers to sell larger, less efficient vehicles as the minimum vehicle. (At roughly 5x the price)
If demand developed for small, inexpensive vehicles they would be at a severe disadvantage to a wide range of manufacturers that currently supply these types of vehicles to nations around the globe.
The rise of electric vehicles would compound this problem, since electric mini vehicles with limited range and speed (but perfect for local use) are common on the global market at the 3000-4000(usd) price point.
There is also a similar class of internal combustion powered vehicles with around 300cc motors at that price point as well.
I would estimate that between the micro-ICE and Electric types, they might easily take over a 10% market segment if allowed to.
I see zero substantiation in that the organisation, American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, is "shadowy".
It's great that our system has ~50 different jurisdictions that can each choose their own regulations, and it makes sense that each of the states doesn't want to spend the resources studying the issues to create their own conclusions and legislation. But these type of organizations should be recognized and regulated for the type of governmental apparatus they most certainly are, rather than being allowed to skate by as "private" entities.
As for kei trucks, I feel like I should be in the target market but I just don't see their appeal. But of course, I don't have to personally see their appeal to believe that others should be able to register them.
When I was a kid in the 1970s I saw car dealers try every trick in the book to upsell my dad to larger cars. By the late 2010s Japanese brands caught up with American brands: I was looking for a Fit in 2017 but new ones weren't available, I had to settle on a used Fit at new car pricing. Allegedly the factory had been washed out in a flood but the dealer had almost 100 HR-Vs in a line that nobody wanted to buy that are made in the same factory. In the meantime a customer would sell a Fit back to them and they'd sell it to me the next day.
Honda discontinued the Fit alleging that sales were poor but in the area around Ithaca it's one of the most popular cars, it is a running gag that another Fit owner will park next to you at the supermarket and I'm sure it would make a great getaway car.
If a kei truck fell into my life, I'd certainly use it for what it works for - which is seemingly hauling small loads of bulky or heavy goods on local trips. But by the time I'm towing/hauling, I generally want the versatility of a good size trailer. Handling much more weight than a truck, fitting full sheet goods, much lower to the ground for easy loading, versatile with removable sides, and with a little planning I can fork things on/off. If I wanted a dump bed, I'd get a dump trailer. I've been using an inherited "crossover" SUV as the tow vehicle. If I were looking at trucks it would mainly be for a better tow vehicle for highways (heavier and larger engine), which a kei truck does not fill on a few dimensions.
I can see kei trucks being handy for certain types of contractors in tight urban environments. But going out to even just the suburbs I think those advantages start go to away in favor of more versatile US-sized pickup trucks. And I think much of the interest in kei trucks isn't even coming from contractors, but rather from DIYers that would be better served by small trailers. But I'd love to learn what I'm missing.
I like the Fit, I bought one and had zero issues finding one, they were sitting on the lot for ages. This narrative is silly. Sales were poor. Look at the Fit vs the CRV. Honda was selling 30-50k US Fits a year. They were selling 200-350k CRVs a year. The HRV since the year after its introduction is also crushing Fit sales, but is not a great seller...probably because it's a smaller size; until 2022, it was based on the Fit platform.
The margins on a 50k SUV are huge.
Government changed emission laws etc for "normal" cars, excluded heavier cars because "well, nobody would actually drive a 3 ton truck as a daily driver, so they're used by companies".
American car companies got a lightbulb moment and started making MASSIVE SUVs that were excluded in regulations. People started buying said massive trucks as daily drivers.
Wired article about the SUV loophole: https://www.wired.com/story/the-us-wants-to-close-the-suv-lo...
All the US needs to do is include SUVs in EPA etc regulation like normal vehicles and their popularity will dwindle because they'll start costing WAY more than normal sedans and station wagons - like they should
It’s also the case that cost already increases with vehicle size. As your own article notes, American consumers have already demonstrated they’re willing to pay huge premiums for larger vehicles.
> Automakers have reasons to sell bigger vehicles outside of emissions regulations. SUVs and trucks typically cost only a bit more to make than smaller vehicles, but consumers have demonstrated that they’re willing to pay as much as 50 percent more for them, making profit margins much higher.
Significantly lower? Probably not. I bet in some ways higher, other ways lower. But different for sure.
Problem is probably the landscape of huge cars proliferating in the US vs smaller cars other places.
But safety is not inherently worse in lower speed collisions [1]:
"Conclusions: Although we are generally concerned that drivers of small vehicles suffer more severe injuries, our results suggest that, for real-world accidents, K-cars provide similar safety for drivers involved in frontal collisions as standard vehicles in low delta V impact conditions."
> Notably, people tend to see what they expect to see.
> When they are looking for cars, they tend not to see motorcycles, even when they are in plain view.
Watch/take this Selective Attention test (1 min 22 sec):
When they are looking for cars, they tend not to see motorcycles, even when they are in plain view.
OTOH, motorcycles can fit into blind spots on cars that other cars cannot, often into blind spots that typically go unnoticed.
"Believe it or not, some drivers point their side mirrors inward — so they see only their own cars — instead of rotating them outward" [2].
Blind spots are self-induced. I've never driven a consumer vehicle where I couldn't adjust my mirrors properly to get rid of blindspots.
[0] https://www.defensivedriving.com/safe-driver-resources/how-t...
[1] https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15131074/how-to-adjus...
[2] https://www.aarp.org/auto/driver-safety/car-mirrors-blind-sp...
Aside from ride-height, these vehicles are much lower standing.
If safety / standards are an issue just demand these vehicles meet them as well instead of outright banning them.
But the difference on this side of the big wet bit is that we attribute a big percentage of the safety score to pedestrian safety too - something Americans don't care about.