The Real Reason America Can’t Have The Tiny Japanese-Style Cars Trump Says He Wants

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President Trump's call for more Japanese-style "tiny cars" on American roads will quickly collide with America's bloated automobile culture, unless he and every U.S. policymaker band together to radically reshape the policies that make our roads so dangerous for anyone outside of a massive SUV — and especially those who aren't in a car at all.

Earlier this month, Trump made headlines when he told White House reporters about a recent trip to Japan, and his newfound enthusiasm for the micro "kei" cars and trucks which populate its roads.

"They're very small, they're really cute," the president said of the ultra-kawaii vehicles. "And I said, 'How would that do in this country [the U.S.]?' And everyone seems to think, 'Good,' but you're not allowed to build them. So I authorized the Secretary [of Transportation] to immediately approve the production of those cars."

The secretary in question, Sean Duffy, happened to be on hand and confirmed that Trump "gave me the direction to clear the regulations on this. [So] if Toyota or any other company wants to make smaller, more affordable cars [that are] fuel efficient, we have cleared the decks so they can make them in America and sell them in America."

At first, it might seem cognitively dissonant to hear the Trump administration champion fuel efficient cars, especially in light of its years-long crusade against electric vehicles and rollback of fuel economy standards just two days prior to this press conference.

If the president's real prerogative is to accelerate American automobile sales, though, it certainly sounds plausible that cheaper mini-mobiles could juice the market and "give people a chance ... to have a brand new car," as Trump suggested. The average transaction price for new vehicle in the U.S. was nearly $50,000 in October of this year, and that swollen pricetag was driven in part by the swelling size of the average U.S. SUV and truck.

Meanwhile, a brand new kei car in Japan starts at around $10,000.

Even if Duffy could "clear the [regulatory] decks" to make way for mini-cars, though — which, to be clear, he can't do alone — the kei car revolution is still unlikely to hit U.S. roads anytime soon. And that's largely because of size of those (large) roads themselves, and the gargantuan cars that would likely remain on them even if every automaker in America embraced the whiplash and started pumping out Matchbox cars for the common man.

For the sake of argument, though let's pretend that Duffy could wave a magic wand, defy decades Congressional mandates, and grant U.S. automakers a slate of exemptions to build cars that don't meet national safety standards — like, y'know, having airbags, or passing high-speed rollover tests that most kei cars would flunk, because those things aren't required of micro-vehicles in Japan.

Even if that somehow happened, those theoretical automakers would still have to be willing to sacrifice the bloated profits that have largely driven them to produce ever-more-bloated SUVs, in exchange for unlocking a theoretical new market of lower-income buyers who have been getting by with used cars, transit, biking, or walking until now.

Spoiler alert: they probably wouldn't, because 91.7 percent of U.S. households already own a car whether they want to or not, and often can't afford even the used vehicles they're forced to maintain simply to participate in society. And even if they did, the F-150 earned Ford an estimated $10,000 in profit per vehicle in 2019, or more than the entire sticker price of a kei car in Japan.

Even if automakers turned inexplicably altruistic, though, U.S. buyers probably still wouldn't enjoy lower prices on new kei cars than they can already get on used sedans, at least if Duffy's regulatory magic-wand didn't work and they had to invest millions into retrofitting a kei-car to U.S. safety standards. And even if they did, most of the U.S. parts industry isn't domestically producing components small enough to outfit micro-vehicles — and Trump's chaotic tariffs could make importing them prohibitively expensive, too.

NBC's Steve Kopeck reported in October that "while the White House plans to extend the auto tariff offsets through the end of Trump’s second term, it is also working on ways to lure companies — both foreign and domestic — to move overseas production to the United States."

But let's say that domestic automakers somehow start churning out all the "very small, very cute" cars Trump wants. They'd still have to find buyers brave enough to drive them on dangerous U.S. roads, alongside far larger vehicles that are likely to crush them on impact.

The root reason why Japan can get away with selling kei cars with so few safety features is that those mini vehicles aren't often involved in the kind of high-speed crashes that make anti-rollover measures and airbags necessary. And that's in large part because Japanese roads don't permit high speeds, defaulting to just 24 miles per hour in urban areas and 18 mph on side streets.

The U.S., by contrast, is rife with massive arterials and collector roads through neighborhoods where speeds routinely top 35 or even 45 miles per hour — and that's when drivers are following the law. Pedestrian deaths, which are concentrated on those roads, routinely top 7,000 per year as a result.

Urban highways are common, too, and because speed limits on both are usually set by the states, Trump and co. can't do anything to lower them to levels where kei trucks —which typically top out at around 37.3 miles per hour — would even be legally be allowed to travel.

Of course, Japan's slow streets also mean that if a crash happens, the people involved in it are less likely to be killed — whether they're in a vehicle or not. And because those Japanese cars are far smaller and lighter, they're even less likely to crush other vehicles, bicyclists, or pedestrians in their path.

And critically, those rock-bottom speed limits are complemented by a raft of other multimodal-friendly policies that reduce the number of cars on the road, period, like not allowing residents to purchase cars unless they prove they have an off-street place to park them, ultra-dense development patterns in most major cities that make walking the common-sense choice for most trips, strong (if un-conventional) bike policies, and of course, next-level public transit and intercity rail.

Add it all up, and Japan had a traffic fatality rate of just 2.1 per 100,000 residents in 2024. In the U.S., it was nearly 13.

None of this is to say that America shouldn't encourage domestic kei car production, or that federal lawmakers shouldn't relax import standards that make it virtually impossible to ship in the original article before vehicles turn 25 years old. They can and they should, and our roads would be safer if they did.

To make kei cars a truly competitive option on U.S. roads, though, would require reimagining those roads themselves, including their speed limits, the physical infrastructure that reinforces those limits, and the regulations and incentives that help dictate the average size of every other car on the road. And if we did that, we'd see even tinier, cuter mobility options start to emerge — like the bike, the scooter, and the humble sidewalk.

Streetsblog NYC did a fun video about kei cars over the summer: