Technology

59424 readers

2804 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

842

Move over, Ford and Chevy: Kei trucks are pulling up as customers opt for smaller, cheaper vehicles (www.nbcnews.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

291 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Doing comparisons like these don’t make sense when motorcycles and trikes exist.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I didn't really intend for it to be a comparison or supporting the narrative these trucks are 'too small for America', I just find many people hear small truck and imagine "like a ford ranger but a little less", as their starting reference point. Gotta go smaller, scale is tough.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

My bad. It just seems like the low hanging fruit everyone plays off of.

We actually used to get vehicles close to this size. The Suzuki samurai (really a jimny) was sold here for a number of years. Geo sold a fair number of almost kei cars that Suzuki made.

I’m a fan of limiting them from interstate highways, but keeping them registrable. It’s just dumb they cite “safety” even though the law explicitly calls out they aren’t required to be safe. I just want a nice 25-45 mph city truck to lug dirty junk around.

But if anyone is curious, Douglas deBoard imported so many European cars in the 80’s that cut into the profits of Mercedes USA enough that they pushed the law through. Buying them in Europe and importing them was actually cheaper (in some aspects) than buying a US market one. And the imported cars were better equipped!

It wasn’t even about protecting American manufacturers or trucks. Mercedes has just always been a huge dick.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

No lie. Gray market Mercedes were awesome. Way more powerful and you could get base models with zero cruft - manual transmissions and wind up windows.