This episode was one of the reasons I stopped listening to Planet Money. I’d like to think that they are a bit more knowledgable about the other shit they report on but that episode was such an amazing collection of ignorance that I lost faith in the rest of their reporting. It’s almost as if the entirety of their research was watching that one episode of Top Gear (a shitty, fictional car show about a dumb racist).
Americans have better access to a wider variety of trucks than any other consumer market in the world. This should hardly be surprising since gas is very cheap and there aren’t any onerous taxes on vehicle size or displacement, unlike the majority of other countries. There are also virtually no barriers to entry for carmakers if they want to sell cars in the US. The Chicken Tax is a thing that exists, but its existence is all but irrelevant to any carmaker worthy of note - Toyota and Nissan and until recently Honda all sold trucks here with no issue, yes they would have to build them in the US but Toyota and Nissan have been doing that for decades, and in any case, you don’t have to build them in the US, only within NAFTA, and virtually all carmakers make cars in Mexico nowadays anyway, because Mexico is virtually the cheapest place in the world to make modern cars.
If there is one thing that could be tenuously construed as being a law that limits access to trucks, it’s the EPA’s relatively strict regulations on diesel NOx emissions. Therefore, an emissions compliant diesel engine in the US is quite expensive to produce, and a small truck with a diesel engine simply cannot be produced economically and sold at a competitive price. Even then, this is more because competition in the US has driven the price of gas powered trucks to very low levels. In most other countries, even diesel trucks with compliant exhausts would probably still sell due to the expense of competing cars and trucks in general. Most trucks and commercial vehicles in other countries are diesel powered and spew carcinogenic exhaust into their atmospheres because their countries are shitty and corrupt. However this is changing - even France and other European countries are improving their emissions regulations to match that of the US.
What truck sold in other countries are people pining for, exactly? The Toyota Hilux? The Tacoma sold in the US is essentially the same or better thing, and cheaper than virtually any other market. You can’t get a diesel for the reasons outlined above but you wouldn’t want one anyway, certainly not a Toyota diesel which are widely known to be junk. One reason Toyota was never quite as popular in Europe as in most other places was their lack of ability to build a good diesel engine. The global Ford Ranger? The current model is virtually the same size as the F-150 and the F-150 is a much better truck for a lower price. Australian car-based Utes? There’s no way you could build them for a competitive price anywhere outside of Australia, which is a closed market with closed market pricing.
I guess it can’t hurt to be able to buy those very basic Chinese “breadvans”, Wuling Sunshine, etc. I doubt any Americans would be interested in them though. IIRC FAW-Foton makes a licensed copy of a previous generation Toyota Hilux (they claim, it looks more like an Isuzu/Chevy Colorado to me) with a Cummings 4 cylinder diesel and a Borg Warner transfer case, which could be interesting, but the retail price in China is the equivilant of something like $30k USD. Possibly this is due to taxes or some other regulation in China where everything is more expensive than the US, so if they could bring it to the US for $15k they would probably have a winner.