It’s not the chicken tax itself, even if it plays a role. It’s that the chicken tax makes it not economically feasible to try to import light trucks, so they aren’t designed to U.S. emissions and safety regulations. And several U.S. regulations are, in my opinion, misguided, but that doesn’t really change the fact that an importer wouldn’t be able to comply with vehicles that weren’t engineered to those specifications.
Meanwhile, the cars and trucks engineered to American safety and emissions regulations face the perverse incentive to get bigger. This article describes some of the overall issues but contains this interesting nugget:
That’s a sensible recommendation. Except the 3,000-pound 2010 Ranger featured by IIHS has become the bigger and taller 2024 Ford Ranger, which weighs up to 5,325 pounds. Like so many US cars, the Ranger got supersized, a trend fed by a mix of consumer desires and government regulations that carved out gas efficiency loopholes for the trucks and SUVs that make up a swelling share of the US vehicle fleet.
In a sense, the trend of people wanting kei trucks paradoxically comes from the same reason why they’re not street legal: they didn’t get bigger because they weren’t subject to U.S. regulations pushing trucks to get bigger, but the noncompliance with those regulations makes them impossible to import and register (at least until they’re 25 years old).
It’s not the chicken tax itself, even if it plays a role. It’s that the chicken tax makes it not economically feasible to try to import light trucks, so they aren’t designed to U.S. emissions and safety regulations. And several U.S. regulations are, in my opinion, misguided, but that doesn’t really change the fact that an importer wouldn’t be able to comply with vehicles that weren’t engineered to those specifications.
Meanwhile, the cars and trucks engineered to American safety and emissions regulations face the perverse incentive to get bigger. This article describes some of the overall issues but contains this interesting nugget:
In a sense, the trend of people wanting kei trucks paradoxically comes from the same reason why they’re not street legal: they didn’t get bigger because they weren’t subject to U.S. regulations pushing trucks to get bigger, but the noncompliance with those regulations makes them impossible to import and register (at least until they’re 25 years old).