Maybe it’s #vanlife Instagram, maybe it’s Cars & Bids, maybe it’s seeing the occasional Daihatsu Hijet or Mitsubishi Delica in person — whatever it is, I’ve become fascinated by Japanese Domestic Market (JDM) microvans and kei cars. Not just the design, ethos, and regulations that led to their existence, but from the perspective of the US market, they’re like a window into an alternate universe. Americans have been writing for years and years about their surprising popularity and practicality. Despite that, they have never found a foothold in the US, and when they have appeared, they’ve been foiled by poor design and marketing choices.
Having lived in NYC for two decades, I’ve seen a dramatic shift in the city’s relationship with cars. Many see cars as the enemy: huge, dangerous, polluting, taking up valuable space. The DOT has methodically rebuilt roads to be more bicycle and pedestrian friendly, remove lanes and entire blocks, and make it more difficult for aggressive or dangerous driving. But as long as rural and suburban communities exist that are only reachable by car, as long as places to travel exist, cars are going to exist and serve a purpose. The solution isn’t to make cars disappear. New York City indeed owes much of its singular success and character to its subway system, and we should be investing much more in public transit. But we should also be pressuring the auto industry to design and produce cars appropriate for a city in the US market, as it already does in Europe and Japan: slower, more efficient, more practical, taking up a smaller footprint. Instead we’ve ended up with all of these huge, Texas-sized sedans, SUVs, and pickup trucks. Micro cars like the Smart car, Fiat 500 and Mini Cooper have an city-sized footprint, but are impractically small, with hardly any cargo space. Meanwhile, some kei cars have the footprint of a Mini Cooper but have the cargo room of an SUV.
Kei Car Regulations and Their Impact in Japan
Quoting Wikipedia:
The kei category was created by the Japanese government in 1949, to stimulate both car ownership and growth of Japan’s car industry.
Kei cars have modern safety standards in Japan and are rated to 87 mph. Meanwhile, every car in the US has a speedometer that goes to 160 mph. What possible reason is there to even allow cars to go above 100mph, let alone imply that the car could conceivably travel at 160 mph?
Modern Kei cars are often available with forced-induction engines, automatic and continuously variable transmissions, and choice of front-wheel or all-wheel drive. After the 1980s, Kei cars had matured so much in power, speed, and passive (crash) safety, that they were no longer bound to lower maximum speeds than other cars. Japan’s carmakers since agreed on a self-imposed maximum 140 km/h (87 mph) speed, mostly because of their narrow width.
Comparison to A-Segment cars
Car size types have an international classification called ISO 3833-1977. Wikipedia’s article on Car Classification lists all of the different segments. Europe’s “city car” classification fits the A-segment classification. Notable examples are the Fiat Panda, Fiat 500, and Suzuki Ignis.
Quoting Wikipedia again:
Kei cars are often considered the Japanese equivalent of the European Union’s A-segment “city cars”. However, contrary to Japan’s special Kei cars’ legal status and limitations, there are no EU- or pan-European legal restrictions, exceptions or benefits for what European auto journalism or market analysts call the ‘A’ market-segment of motor vehicles. Although some Kei models are successfully exported or licensed, the great majority are designed and built for the Japanese domestic market (JDM) only, as they are entirely optimized to offer the most appealing vehicles within the very specific to Japan Kei-car rules, in addition to mainly being built with the steering on the right. Contrary to popular belief, according to the 1 January 1990 regulations, there is no official power limit for Kei cars. The limit is dictated by a Gentleman’s Agreement between Japanese auto manufacturers as the most powerful Kei car at the time was rated at 64 PS (47 kW; 63 hp). This agreement was set into place in order to prevent a horsepower war.
The market share of A-segment cars in Europe is around 7-8%, 45% in India. Kei cars account for 30% of the market in Japan. Meanwhile in the US, A-segment market share is 0.5%.
Even the way cars are classified is problematic: the implication that small is economy and tiny is a mold that was broken by the microvan, which is both compact and incredibly roomy.
Regulatory Conditions in the US
American regulations were designed to minimize fatalities in high-speed collisions. This is reasonable when you consider that the US is vast and criss-crossed with highways. For better and for worse, when the car first appeared, the US was redesigned around it - and the interstate highway system was designed to move as many people through them as quickly and as safely as possible.
This article talks about how and why the Maine DMV canceled the registrations of Mitsubishi Delicas in the state, citing a report by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA) called “Best Practice Regarding Registration and Titling of Mini-Trucks”. The report, from 2010, looks at new Chinese off-road mini-trucks like the Chongqing ChangAn Tiger, and seem to be arguing against using these golf-cart like mini-trucks on the US highway system. Which doesn’t feel like a real argument. I’m not sure who is arguing that golf carts should be allowed on highways. The Chongqing ChangAn Tiger is nowhere near a kei car or a microvan. The AAMVA authors don’t appear to have considered the mounting transportation challenges facing American cities, or attempted to balance the concern of high-speed safety against concerns impacting cities like crippling traffic congestion, street parking, and air and noise pollution.
In addition, how you design your roads influences how fast people drive on them. Wide straightaways were in favor for many decades, and many urban centers and public transit systems across the US were demolished in the 1950s and 60s to make way for high-speed roadways(1)(2). It’s seemingly only now becoming clear to US regulators that cities maybe shouldn’t have highway-like roads running through them. The same applies to car design: the more we design cars and SUVs to survive high-speed crashes, the more people will drive faster and more aggressively, because they (perhaps rightly) believe they will survive a crash. As a driver, I know firsthand how many aggressive drivers exist on the road today, and the majority of them are driving massive SUVs and pickup trucks. I would even argue that these vehicles are designed for aggressive driving, given how many look like tanks or military vehicles. That the Cybertruck is even allowed on public roads speaks volumes to where we are.
Studies are showing how dangerous large SUVs and pickups with high hood heights are to pedestrians:
In a thought experiment, Tyndall calculated what would happen if vehicle hood heights were limited by regulation to 49.2 inches (1.25 m) or less. “Across the 2,126 pedestrians killed by high-front-ended vehicles (1.25 m), I estimate 509 lives would be saved annually by adopting a 1.25-m front-end limit. The lives saved equal 7% of annual pedestrian deaths. Reducing the limit to 1.2 m would spare an estimated 757 pedestrian lives per year, and further reducing the cap to 1.1 m would spare an estimated 1,350 pedestrian lives per year,” he writes.
While the conventional design of putting the engine block in front of the passenger compartment is intrinsically safer than a “cab-over” engine placement, that doesn’t mean a cab-over placement doesn’t have a place in the US. Japan has shown that they absolutely do: in cities, where cars and trucks are driven at relatively slow speeds, on roadways designed for slow speeds.
The Auto Industry Shapes Demand
The industry plays a role not only in designing and manufacturing the cars, but in shaping popular demand. I believe the auto industry is fully responsible for the shift towards larger and larger cars, trucks, and SUVs. Consider mobile phones for a moment: there was a year or two where the industry was optimizing towards smaller and smaller form factors, so we ended up with comically small phones. Then the iPhone appeared, and the industry reversed course and began optimizing towards larger and larger screens, conflating larger form factors with “better”. It reached the point where screen sizes were bigger than our hands, so they had to start adding UI paradigms like Reachability just to allow our hands to reach the top of the screen.
For many decades, the auto industry and regulators have conflated “small” with “economy”, and “large” with “premium”. That’s led to a dearth of well-made compact cars and wagons in the US, unlike in Japan and Europe where you have ample choice. And we’re stuck in a horrible feedback loop where, because there are so many giant trucks and SUVs on the road, people want to drive the largest cars and SUVs just to feel safer and see over the cars in front of them. We need federal, state and local governments to apply pressure on the industry to move it in a more sane, sustainable direction. Even though it’s clear that we need cars to become smaller, safer (for those outside the car!), and more efficient, it seems like all of the major players are moving in the opposite direction.
Et Tu, Volkswagen?
I’m still angry that Volkswagen discontinued wagons in the US market and instead are now pushing giant SUVs like the Atlas. Even with their glacial shift into EVs, the options are just not inspiring. Their new ID. Buzz (what kind of name is that?), which could’ve been a watershed moment for microvans, is enormous - more like an electric Honda Odyssey than anything else. I’ve driven VW sedans and wagons for my entire adult life, but all of their recent moves makes me feel like VW has lost their way, and isn’t the car company for me any more.
Pressure Points
Much has already been written about the 1975 loophole that allow SUVs and pickups to be classified as trucks instead of cars. That should be fixed at the federal and state level, but we should go further. We should provide strong tax credits for smaller, lower-footprint, more efficient cars, and create tax penalities for driving huge SUVs and pickup trucks. Cars and trucks over a certain weight should require a more rigorous license to drive, and owners should have to pay more for tolls, since they contribute much more to the deterioration of the roadway. I would argue that large SUVs and pickups should be penalized for being driven and parked in congested cities. It’s one thing to have a car in a city - it’s another to choose to buy a Chevy Surburban or Tahoe while living in a city with street parking. Left to their own devices, the auto industry will just continue to make more of whatever sells the most and makes them the most profit. Japan solved this by imposing regulations that led to the creation and adoption of responsibly-sized kei cars, vans, and trucks.
This doesn’t even touch on the miserable state of automotive design in the US, where every manufacturer optimizes towards the average, where every brand’s unique character and design language washes away, where they all end up looking the same*. But it doesn’t have to be that way! With the magic of generative AI tools like Midjourney, anyone can imagine what modern, well-designed, electric microvans could look like, in some alternate universe where these things are designed, manufactured, and sold in the US.
Design, at its best, can jolt the public imagination and show everyone what’s possible. Steve Jobs knew this and was perhaps the most iconic example of this, but anybody - even you - can also make that happen. I believe a way to help mitigate the transportation and environmental crisis is to be bold and innovative with how we get around. Microvans and kei cars are extremely practical - and they can be extremely cool, too, if we would just design them to be. Let’s all show the auto industry and our federal, state and city governments what’s possible, so they can do their part to help get us there.
