Big Rollout For Small Car: Nissan Launches DAYZ Kei (You’ve seen it already.)

Nissan and Mitsubishi today presented their jointly developed, but separately badged and marketed kei car to an amazingly large contingent of the Japanese press.  TTAC readers are quite familiar with the car(s). They have watched the Nissan DAYZ and its Mtsubishi siblings, the eK Wagon and eK Custom  on its first day of production at Mitsubishi's  plant in Mizushima, near Hiroshima. Mizushima more than two weeks ago. Today, the car arrived in Tokyo. In an overall weak Japanese market, there are two segments that show resiliency, and that's kei cars and imports.   While sales of regular vehicles in Japan are down nearly 11 percent in the first 5 months,  sales of minivehicles decreased only 1.7 percent in the same period.  Sales of  imported cars were up 24.8 in May, its 11 straight month of increase, the Japan Automobile Importers Association said today. For the year, imports are up 13.2 percent.   According to some voices in Detroit, kei cars are just another sign of a closed Japanese car market that makes imports impossible.  The facts say otherwise, but the voices in Detroit are amazingly fact-resistant. It is true that kei cars have a growing 40 percent share of the Japanese market, and foreign makers have none of this ;pie. Not because they are locked out. Nothing keeps a foreign automaker from offering a car in Japan that is not more than 11.2 ft long, no more than 4.9 ft wide, that has an engine displacement not over 660 cc, and provides not more than 63 hp, thereby qualifying as a kei car. Daimler one sold a Smart ForTwo as a Smart K  in Japan. It turned into the worst selling kei car – a kei  is basic, low cost transportation, something  the Smart was not. Foreigners would be nuts to target the small car market that barely is big enough for Japanese makers who had been in it since MacArthur packed moving boxes at the Dai-Ichi Building. Despite their success in Japan, keis are mostly unsalable elsewhere. They are widely regarded as underpowered and made for skinny Japanese bodies. Development costs must be amortized over as many units as possible, and a kei car simply cannot reach the global unit sales of a regular car. In this video, the always elegant former Time Magazine reporter Coco Masters, now displaced to Nissan in Yokohama, looks into the kei car market and asks Nissan COO Toshiyuki Shiga if and when keis will be sold elsewhere. Watch Shiga make a comment about the small cars not being wide bodied enough for the wider bodies of overseas customers. Something I had to put to the test immediately. Jalopnik will like this one: The author in a flesh colored kei – Picture courtesy Chris Keeffe No true at all! from The Truth About Cars http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com

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