The Texas House of Representatives has passed Senate Bill 1816 that allows imported mini vehicles that are at least 25 years old to be driven on Texas roads. Texas joins 28 other states in legalizing mini vehicles, including Japanese Kei trucks.
Gwen Howerton, audience producer for The Chron in Houston, reported on the amendment and spoke to the Texas Standard about the cute-looking vehicles. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Can you describe these Kei trucks for us and tell us what makes them so popular?
Gwen Howerton: I think the best way to put it is imagine the cab of maybe like a U-Haul or something and kind of shrink it down a little bit, attach it to a flatbed, and it’s what it sounds like – it’s a mini truck, right?
And so these are a classification of vehicles that are really popular in Japan and were really, really popular in the ’80s and ’90s. They’re called Kei trucks, and then there are cars that are about the same size – they’re Kei cars.
“Kei,” it’s the Japanese classification for these cars. It essentially means “light truck” in Japanese. And what they are is they are these cars that are designed to be really tiny and compact because they’re mostly made for city life.
So if you’ve ever been to Japan, think about Tokyo, right? It’s a mega city. So many people live there. It’s very compact. The streets are small. You have all these narrow alleyways, things like that. And so these are these very utilitarian vehicles that were made for people who live in the city.
You know maybe you’re a courier and you move packages or you commute every so often, right? You don’t need this giant big car like we have in the U.S. You need something small and compact that you can fit around tight corners and alleyways, parallel park very easy. And so that’s kind of where these come from, right?
And they’re very out of place here in the U.S., if you’ve ever seen one. You sometimes see them driving around town or whatever or at a car show.
You asked me about the popularity of these. These are very popular among enthusiasts. So especially people who love older ’80s and ’90s Japanese cars who like them for the style, right? They’re very interesting and very cute to look at.
You know, people like to customize them. They come in very cool trims, very cool colors. They kind of, I think, look very like retro-future in a way. If you’ve ever watched a movie maybe made in the ’60s and ’70s, it kind of looks like a vision of what those people thought the future was like. And that’s why I’m a big fan of them. And that’s I think why people like them, but they’re also, again, they’re very utilitarian, right? Because that’s what they’re made to be.
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Well, they are tiny though and they don’t necessarily have all the bells and whistles or even the safety features that a lot of times we’re used to in our vehicles now. Was that one of the challenges? Or what were some of the challenges to getting Kei trucks recognized by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles?
It’s a very weird regulatory framework, right?
So you have federal regulations which in the past decade or so were passed to appease vintage car collectors that essentially said a car that is 25 years or older that doesn’t have the certain safety features that cars in America need can be imported into the United States. And it doesn’t say anything about registering them or driving them on state roads because those are state policies.
But that kind of opened the floodgates for these kinds of cars to be brought into the U.S. and sold by different collectors and smaller outfits that kind of specialize in custom cars.
But you’re right, they’re 25 years old. A lot of these cars, they were built in Japan where they don’t drive on the right side of the road like we do. So like you said earlier, the steering wheel is on the passenger side. Some of them don’t have airbags, some of them don’t have seat belts because they were made 25, 30 years ago.
And so that was, for the longest time, the biggest obstacle to having them in Texas. You can own one, but if you go to the DMV, for the longest time they would say you can’t register this and it’s not street legal because it doesn’t have these safety features. And so essentially what this bill that was just passed, Senate Bill 1816, it essentially amends the state code to say these vehicles are classified as miniature vehicles and they can be registered and titled in the state of Texas, just like anything else.
And it was really a big push from the Instagram page, and it’s an enthusiast group, called Lone Star Kei. They really wanted this passed. The founder, David McChristian, he told me that essentially he called every single legislator and told them about this. And that got some movement done where the DMV changed its regulations.
But this codifies it into state law. A lot of people who might want a utility vehicle like a truck or an SUV, they don’t wanna buy these massive $40-, $50-, $60-, $70,000 trucks that are just so unwieldy to own. But with something like this, if you have a couple of grand, you can import it, you can drive it and register it and title it in the state of Texas now.
