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December 9, 2025
Jay RameyDisregard the YouTubers, the EPA is not what kept us from getting a $13,000 Toyota pickup in the US.
A few days ago President Trump, flanked by grinning auto executives, announced a proposed rollback of the Biden-era CAFE standards that the automakers were already largely ignoring. Fines for exceeding CAFE standards were a casualty of the One Big Beautiful Bill months ago, so the plan to plan the repeal of related agency rules was largely a formality.
But a curious and unexpected tangent of the White House meeting turned out to be Trump’s remarks about small cars and trucks, such as those offered in Asia.
As it seems, Trump had caught a glimpse of some compact trucks during a trip to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for the ASEAN summit at the end of October. And, despite not being a car person, the image of trucks that don’t look like the typical American trucks with locomotive front ends used for Costco runs appears to have stuck around in his mind for longer than 5 minutes against all odds, entire weeks in fact, to the point that he brought it up completely unprovoked.
However, because we live in 2025, this means the small and inexpensive truck news cycle has already produced a bumper crop of influencer videos, some more detached from reality than others, promising hard working Americans all sorts of foreign-market pickups because “Trump! EPA! something!” (Like a lot of “content” being produced right now, it’s tough to say if the people making it are stupid, or if they just think their audience is stupid. It could be both. -Ed.)
One recent Instagram video claims that the planned rollback of CAFE standards is “unlocking the door for multiple cars being released in the United States,” permitting sales of the Toyota Hilux Champ, a cheap truck that YouTubers can’t stop making videos about.
This truck, offered primarily in Asian markets, is a utilitarian and easily customizable body-on-frame design powered by a 2.4-liter diesel paired either with a six-speed automatic or a five-speed manual. With its starting price of about $14,000, it has recently become something of a fixation among Youtube and social media influencers, eager to capitalize on the phenomenon of inexpensive foreign-market vehicles amid high prices for just about everything in the US.
But CAFE regulations aren’t actually the thing keeping the Hilux Champ out of the US. Any company bringing newly-manufactured foreign-market trucks, whether of the kei variety or something larger, will face a wall of regulations and protectionist measures.
But even without getting too deep into the Federal Register and EPA and NHTSA standards, there are a few practical, real-world business reasons we won’t see new The Hilux Champ on dealership lots in the US.
For one thing, there is still the Chicken Tax, which adds a hefty 25% duty to foreign-made trucks. And this would cause the starting price of the Hilux Champ to balloon quickly.
And quite a few other things would have to be changed, including swapping the 2.4-liter diesel for something that complies with existing US emissions regulations, though that’s likely not a huge hurdle. It would still impose new costs, as the Hilux Champ was not engineered with US-friendly engine and transmission combos in mind.
Another change that would have to be made includes adapting the truck to U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) crash standards. The Hilux Champ was not designed from scratch to comply with US crash safety standards, having been aimed at very different markets, and the engineering would impose its own costs that will further hike its starting price.
At this point it should be painfully clear that it’s easier to engineer a truck to comply with US emissions and crash standards from the start, while also building it in the US specifically to the demonstrated tastes of the US market.
But this could require a new manufacturing footprint — perhaps the largest investment that Toyota would face in this venture — short of kicking one of its current models off the assembly line. This includes the Tacoma, which has been the thrifty truck offering since its launch in the 1990s, and which currently carries a starting price of $33,185 with destination.
With US manufacturing costs, even a completely unaltered Hilux Champ is not likely to retain its $14,000 starting price, to put it mildly, compared to the costs the automaker currently faces in Thailand where it assembles the truck.
If there is another, more practical reason Toyota might not want to offer a $14,000 truck in the US, assuming all the technical issues were magically circumvented, it’s the fact that the profit margins on a $14,000 truck are virtually non-existent, which is an issue that makes kei trucks and vans particularly unattractive to US automakers as well.
So the Tacoma’s $33,185 starting price here might well be where a completely federalized and US-manufactured Hilux Champ might actually start.
Even if all of these technical and business issues could be solved simply or cheaply, there is still the issue of what consumers actually want. And if the past few decades are any indication, they want a luxury SUV interior with a relatively modest bed out back for Costco runs.
So as much as I’d like to see a truly utilitarian Toyota truck stateside for $14,000, importing a 25-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser 70 with a utility bed is perhaps the easiest way to put one into my driveway.
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December 10, 2025
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