Hi, all. Got a couple of car questions but they’re different enough for two threads.
I am seeing more people around locally than before driving right hand drive cars and trucks, like Nissan sedans, Toyota mini-van (Hiace?), or very tiny Suzuki pickup trucks like this. I assume they are JDM vehicles and the owner imported them across the ocean to use in central Canada. I understand the appeal of something like a Skyline GTR that is a really cool car that isn’t sold here. But there are a lot of downsides to driving RH in a LH country. Passing on single lane highways. Turning left across a busy intersection. Getting parts when it breaks down or is in an accident.
I went on vacation in Turks & Caicos a few years back and almost everything on the road was a wrong-handed drive imported from somewhere in Asia. I understood that Japan has strict laws about emissions and safety so cars become unusable as they age and get disposed of to lots of developing countries. Are the same forces at work in Canada & the US? Why would one choose to import one of these machines? Are they super cheap to buy? Is trans-ocean delivery easier than I imagine?
No, people aren’t importing cars from Japan to the U.S. or Canada because they are cheaper. They just want fun cars that weren’t originally sold in North America. In Canada and the U.S., to import a new car, it must meet the relevant new car safety and emissions standards. But, in Canada, you can import a car that is at least 15 years old without meeting those standards (25 years in the U.S.). There are plenty of people who grew up playing video games and reading magazines about unusual Japanese cars who can now afford to spend a bit more to actually drive them. I’ll take an Autozam AZ-1 myself, thanks.
I checked one of the vehicles he’s selling, a Mitsubishi Pajero. I note he suggests it as a great mail delivery vehicle, so there is that market too.
I remember seeing some mail rural delivery contractors in NZ with LHD vehicles, imported for much the same reason here. The mailbox was on the left side of the road, so a vehicle with the driver on the left makes it easier to do the deliveries.
Thanks for explaining JDM the first time you used it. Oh, wait, you didn’t so I had to look it up. Japanese Domestic Market. Absolutely intuitive, no need to bother yourself with it.
I’d love to have and be able to drive on the streets one of those K trucks, they can carry a lot of stuff and they’d even fit in my garage. But I’m reasonably sure they would never be street legal, especially in California.
Japan has a car inspection system which used to force most people to get rid of their cars after 11 years. They may have changed that by now. Most Japanese don’t drive their cars nearly as far as Americans do. Most Japanese cars have very low mileage. Or kilometerage, whatever.
We had to sell a 12-year-old car when we moved to Taiwan. It was a Nissan Cube. Some people hate that box look, but I thought it was cool.
I bought it used and when I sold it there was only like 65,000 km on it. But because it was more than 11 years old then I only got several hundreds of dollars for it. It was probably going to go to some Southeast Asian country.
More than one. But, I didn’t care enough to try to figure it out, I just assumed it was a some Japanese Standards group (kind of like SAE, Society of Automotive Engineers, in the US). See, it’s not hard.
And, to be fair, you did use the phrase “right hand drive” in your OP. If you had used “Japanese domestic market vehicle” in your title, it might have made more sense to more people. Since JDM isn’t really a common abbreviation in the US (or Canada, for that matter), I have to wonder who you expected to know what your were talking about.
_(pickup)_(front),_Kuala_Lumpur.jpg){kind=link}