We import Japanese cars but Japanese don’t want US redneck pickup trucks like the ones in Colorado Springs

It probably has more to do with the poor quality of American made trucks and the high import duties that prevent them from being profitable in Japan. Toyotas and other Japanese brands offer much better running vehicles mechanically speaking.

Send the US trucks to Australia. There are loads of rednecks and hicks and outback red dicks.

The main reason is that Japanese manufacturers have very long term views on profitability and US manufacturers are very oriented to short term profits. Investing heavily in reliability, fuel efficiencies and new technologies is bad for short term profitability. More reliable and fuel efficient vehicles mean lower new vehicle sales in the short run as consumers keep reliable vehicles for much longer than junky vehicles that break down all the time. But in the long run, reliability wins market share, which ends up being much more valuable than month to month sales numbers.

What I don’t get is how they can charge over 30,000 for one of those POS trucks in the USA. I’ve rented those Ford sh*ts in Houston and they get you around but that’s about it. The gear changer on the wheel feels like a bucket of bolts

Tofu eating vegans wouldn't understand.

Currently, gas in Japan is about $4.73/gallon vs $2.83 in the US. So, gas guzzlers are much more difficult to afford. I think that the difference used to be much larger, which would contribute to them wanting to buy econoboxes and not something large that America might have been selling at that time.

In many Japanese cities you need to have off street parking in order to buy a car. Japanese homes and lots are smaller than in the US. Homes, on average have half the square footage. If lots are similarly smaller, it seems likely most don't have the space for a Ford 150. Or even a large sedan.

Japanese may buy cars more often than Americans and so long-term reliability may not be as important as we think. Note that the average car on the road in Japan is about 8 years old while in America it's around 11 years.

I've heard that years ago US manufacturers only sent left-hand drive cars to Japan. That doesn't sound safe or convenient when driving on the left side of the street. . In recent decades, we have sent right-hand drive cars.

While Japan does have some low quality items, their society usually doesn't put up with the junk that American consumers do. So, initial quality may be more important there than here. (Note that they also might have a larger middle class and smaller lower class relatively speaking so most people can afford not to buy low quality items.) As the story mentioned, American cars used to have a bad quality reputation. Maybe this was in the 70s and 80s?

There must be even more reasons than the article mentioned. And who cares about the Japanese car market these days when China has so much money!

The clip is about Japan, but most of what US automakers sell here in the US does not sell in Europe either. The companies have a much bigger presence in Europe but sell a different product. GM sells as Vauxhall and Opel, there are Chevrolets, but what they sell is more along the lines of the Cruze or Spark, maybe the small SUV. Ford sells things like the Focus and Fiesta. You just don't see the massive SUVs and pick ups that are sold here. The closest you'll see to those sorts of cars are minivans/people movers.

Our taste in cars is just different from much of the world's. It would seem that there is some sort of protectionism going on in Japan if 95% of their car sales are from Japanese companies and even small cars like the Spark, Fiesta, VW Polo are not selling there. But it seems that any US car maker is going to need to develop one product line for the US and another for the rest of the world.

You won't see full size (or even light) trucks from Toyota, Nissan, Honda cruising Japanese roads hardly at all, either. You see small utility-bed work trucks and delivery vans. Personal use trucks just aren't a thing there, impractical in daily life. You'll see the occasional 4Runner or Montero, but nowhere near the numbers for a typical US city. I think there's less personal worth and identity tied up in the car you drive in Japan compared with the US, as a rule.

What does Colorado Springs have to do with anything? I live in the Springs, and I can say that I've lived many other places where there are WAY more trucks. No, the Springs isn't Boulder. But it's certainly not redneckville.

CS = Dallas Lite

Weinermobile wrote:

I think there's less personal worth and identity tied up in the car you drive in Japan compared with the US, as a rule.

They like to personalize and modify their cars more than Americans, so I don't think that's true.

The US doesn't make small cars, and are in fact abandoning not just small cars, but cars period. If they want to sell in Japan, they should make kei cars (tiny, more akin to the original Mini rather than the bloated BMW Minis), microvans like the Subaru Sambar vs the 2x bigger Amercan market objectively huge "minivans", etc.

ban trucks. very very few people actually need them.

we are all runners who spend time on roads. easy to understand that the larger a car is the more likely it is to kill us.

they are a waste of space in urban environments

and, last but not least, let's not forget about the climate crisis

to all you men who drive a truck because you have masculinity issues and think that a large car makes you more of a man.... get some help.

I forgot to mention the one big American vehicle the Japanese love, the dajiban:

https://youtu.be/-p_SVUt9hbk

bancars wrote:

ban trucks. very very few people actually need them.

we are all runners who spend time on roads. easy to understand that the larger a car is the more likely it is to kill us.

they are a waste of space in urban environments

and, last but not least, let's not forget about the climate crisis

to all you men who drive a truck because you have masculinity issues and think that a large car makes you more of a man.... get some help.

+1 I agree

Watching Movies on your f*cking Phone wrote:

CS = Dallas Lite

Nonsense. I literally moved to CS from Dallas. There's no comparison. I saw 100x more bro trucks in Dallas. CS is the land of the Tacoma, not the F-250 on 37s.

More minivans than Tacomas in CS, actually.

Colorado Springs is Dallas Lite wrote:

More minivans than Tacomas in CS, actually.

A lot of it depends on the part of town...but yeah, a lot of minivans. I'm a downtown/west side guy, and my of COS is probably different from that of someone in Briargate. I see a lot of Subarus and Tacomas/4runners.

Besides the fact that there is no room for big ass trucks in Japan, nobody wants to buy these overpriced pieces of junk anywhere in the world.

It's that simple really.

More Tahoes and Suburbans, too. CS sprawls, but it's not really big enough to separate out vehicle driver types. It's more homogeneous than Denver.