Would be cool if they made a sedan like this, a bare bones car sounds like something I would love
Mitsubishi mirage. Or an Impreza. Outside of AA they don’t have shit and are cheap.
Not a sedan but they ain’t bigger than one .
What’s AA
Air Conditioning nope Automatic Transmission nope Auto Lock nope
Anti Aircraft…. AA
Dacia Sandero. The base model comes in white only and doesn’t include a radio or power windows.
Sure if you don’t have kids or a family and want a miserable car with no comforts. This is just a striped down small tradesman vehicle.
I guess transportation perfection means really really good for this small niche of users?
Yeah, all of us that find F-150 sized trucks, with their minivan sized cabins and useless 4 foot beds, utterly useless and repugnant. There’s still scadd of little trucks from the 80s and 90s on the road. The only vehicle I have ever missed is my old Mazda B2200. I’d buy one of these in a heartbeat.
In America the segment for small pickups is larger than you think and cars are overpriced right now which makes a brand new car you can import for less than 15k mind-boggling. Additionally, the barebones nature of the car is appealing for its low-tech nature. Add that it’s a Toyota, known for reliability.
Maybe you don’t see it as a desirable car because it isn’t to your tastes, but the world doesn’t revolve around you.
I think transportation perfection means better bus, train and bike/pedestrian infrastructure with, ultimately, less vehicles on the road overall.
This is not the target audience. It’s for work purposes. Or someone who doesn’t have a family I guess.
You might not have noticed it, but it is a truck, not a car. That people sometimes confuse those things seems to be an American problem.
A truck for who? Only tradesman. It’s a niche vehicle.
Nobody is going to buy this outside fleets.
A truck is supposed to be a work vehicle. It’s just the Americans that have decided its the best vehicle for every use case. These are built from the ground up as a work vehicle
Now make a $12,000 version with door locks and a basic AC and I’ll buy one this week. I miss 4th/5th gen Hilux
Really wish we could get stuff like this in the US but like the article said the lane keeping, emergency braking, stability control, etc makes it blow up in costs and Americans are too obsessed with 8ft tall massive pickups and SUVs the size of school busses.
Those features cost almost nothing to implement at this point, and wouldn’t add more than $1000 to the end price, if that.
Really, the main issues is that it likely is an absolute deathtrap in terms of impact safety, doubly so with our Truckasauruses everywhere. Not only that, but the reality is that, no matter how much people claim they want these barebones $10k cars, literally no one actually buys them.
Americans don’t look at MSRP, they look at payments, and that makes ultra cheap cars extremely uncompetitive for both the consumer and the lender.
They might only be willing to finance that $10k car for 3 years, and that’s a $300/mo payment, and they only make about $800 over the life of that loan. However, you move up to the $22.5k Corolla, they’ll gladly finance it for 6 years, and for only $50/mo more you get a much nicer car and they make 6x as much in interest at $3500.
Are those numbers actually correct? finance 10k for 4 years but 2.25x as much for 6? Final payments are 14’400 and 25’200 as per your numbers. So 4’400 vs. 2’700 profit plus much higher CAPEX for the lower profit?
Screw all that “assistance” gear. My car ('17 GTI) auto brakes for some leaves the other day while I was travelling 120kph
Luckily there wasn’t anyone right behind me
Yea the brake assist fired on me the other day because I was coming to the base of a hill at decent speed and it thought it was a wall or something I guess. I turned off the lane assist within an hour of having the car since they don’t paint lines well in my state and it kept trying to steer me based off old half faded lines DOT didn’t remove when expanding roads or doing construction.
Basically all I have in life is making sure my S10 is serviceable as my hearse. I keep telling my next of kin “Don’t you rent no fuckin’ flatbed Cadillac when I’ve got a perfectly serviceable Chevrolet. It carried me everywhere while I was alive, it can carry me one more time.” Which for most of my adult life has meant keeping the thing in roadworthy condition, but now that I think about it probably also means I’m going to have to build an S10 compatible casket. I’m a slightly short and stocky guy, so you could build me a crate that’ll fit between the bulkhead and the tailgate, but I bet all the ones down at the local funeral home are built for a 6 foot tall man, and that ain’t gonna work.
I like my little truck, is what I’m trying to say.
Step side or no? I had 2 s10s in the late 90s and early 00’s since a dear took one from me. Loved those little trucks tho, both were that like copper/bronze/gold color. One stick and one automatic
Smooth side, V6, 4 speed automatic, pewter metallic paint with chrome trim, charcoal interior. She’s got 240,000 miles on the clock, I figure about 60,000 more and I’ll have her properly broken in. She’s my 16th birthday present and the only thing I’ve ever touched that didn’t turn to pus.
