The EU bans the sale of US chicken because we use a very light chlorine wash during the chicken processing process but despite these fears the EU allows its bagged salad to be subject to the same chlorine washing process. They know that if we are able to sell our chicken in the EU it would drive their farmers out of business so they invent the fear of CHLORINATED CHICKEN to rally opposition .
This is actually where the eponymous "chicken tax" on light trucks comes from. It was imposed as part of a mostly forgotten trade war between the US and a few European states in response to cheap imported US chicken flooding the European market in the early 60s. This was a few years before Japanese vehicle exports really began taking off and the US auto market's main foreign threat was still German imports, such as the Volkswagen Type 2 and Beetle.
Urbanist-flavored individuals love to blame this tax for the lack of small pickup trucks in North America, but it's not really that simple. For one, "light truck" would entail foreign-built fullsize pickups as well. If there was a foreign analogue to fullsize American trucks, they would be subject to it all the same. The closest is probably Australian market Land Cruisers, or maybe some oddball Euro market pickup like the Renault Alaskan, but these bigger trucks are excluded all the same. "Light Truck" is a broad category.
Second, the chicken tax has been
hilariously easy to circumvent and there's many stories of manufacturers making very simple modifications to their vehicles to get around it. The most well-known is probably the 1978-1986 Subaru BRAT:
As a foreign-built Japanese truck, it one hundred percent would have been subject to the chicken tax. Their move to get around it? Stick two shitty plastic seats in the bed. It's a "passenger vehicle" now! Somehow this dumbass tactic worked on US customs officials and the truck was never subject to the 25% import tariff. The BRAT never sold very well stateside, however, and was discontinued in NA after the 1986 model year. The seats went away right after in markets it was still sold, to the surprise of nobody.
Another example is the Toyota Hilux and the Chevrolet LUV, which was actually a rebadged Isuzu Faster. (1970s Japanese car names are so great, man.)
Both were exported to the US, and both used the same strategy of simply shipping the trucks overseas without a bed. Why? Because if it didn't have a bed, it wasn't a "light truck" and was instead a legally distinct "chassis cab" configuration vehicle. Once the trucks made it to the US, Toyota and GM simply slapped beds on them, and there you go! Chicken tax successfully circumvented. Some actually were sold in chassis cab configuration to various upfitters, so they had some legitimate ground to stand on for importing them in this way. Toyota even set up an entire dedicated plant in Long Beach and LITERALLY all they did there was make truck beds:
The plant still operates today and is Toyota's oldest US manufacturing facility. Now, this loophole actually
did get closed in 1980, so after that Toyota ended up simply charging the tax, which wasn't a big deal anyways because a new Toyota pickup in 1981 was still only about $6000 even with the tax, about $25k in current year dollars. Chevy, on the other hand, responded by simply discontinuing the LUV because they were working on a domestically-built small pickup that would later become the S-10. The LUV was mostly a stopgap measure by GM to have some competition against Japanese import pickups, as well as capitalize off fuel economy concerns in the wake of the 1973 gas crisis. Simply manufacturing the trucks in North America is the most obvious solution to the chicken tax problem, and one that quite a few foreign manufacturers (Honda, Toyota, Mercedes, Nissan, Hyundai, Stellantis kinda) ended up employing.
Even so, these import shenanigans still go on almost to this day. You probably see these around fairly regularly:
From 2009 to 2023, Ford imported the Euro-market Transit Connect into North America as a smaller alternative to the larger Econoline and later Transit cargo vans. How did they do this? Well, they just imported every single one as a passenger van. Though genuine passenger versions did exist, Ford would install seats and rear windows into every single example that crossed the Atlantic from assembly plants in Europe, including cargo-spec work vans. Since there were seats in the back, and passenger windows, it was automatically considered a "passenger vehicle." Once again, not legally a "light truck", no tariff. Once they arrived stateside, the seats came out, the windows were replaced with steel panels, and they were converted back to a normal cargo configuration.
This is probably the most brazen example of a company exploiting this loophole, and Ford did indeed get dinged for this. It mean, it somehow
still took until 2013 for any regulator to even call them out on this, and after an incredibly drawn-out court process, Ford was finally ordered to pay $350 million in "cut that shit out" fines in 2024. This was one year after the model was discontinued, meaning the court battle survived longer than the US-market Transit Connect did.
Ford actually planned to move manufacturing for the third generation Transit Connect to Mexico so that it would fall under NAFTA and they could ignore the chicken tax entirely. However, the model's sales figures were never that impressive, and compact cargo van sales as a whole were on the decline. The entire "compact cargo van" segment in North America ended up being more of an experiment in seeing how well these smaller Euro-style vans sold in the New World and has been pretty much entirely relegated to a decadal trend of the 2010s, not any kind of paradigm shift.
And this finally brings me to my third point: People kinda just don't want these fucking things.
Whenever some company decides to bring these smaller work vehicles to market in North America, they never ever EVER sell as well as their full-size counterparts. The Ford Maverick is a great example of this. For YEARS, people were clamoring for Ford to bring back a small pickup option, that the new Ranger was too big, that the American market NEEDED a compact pickup option. Well, they did, in 2021. Ford hyped the shit out of the Maverick and there was loads of buzz around it. Urbanists were praising it as The Truck America Needs Right Now. But guess what?
The Maverick sold about ~140,000 units combined between Canada and the US last year, its third full year of production. Which is, well, mediocre for any vehicle. Not exactly a failure, but nothing to write home about. But these numbers get so much worse when you compare them to the F-series:
Despite having the option of both the Maverick and the Ranger, sales of F-series trucks absolutely blow both of them out of the goddamn water. Just about ~900,000 trucks in both countries. Ford sold more F-series pickups in Canada
alone than Mavericks in the entire US last year. F-series sales have
increased by about ~150k units SINCE the introduction of the Maverick. If anything, it's the Ranger that's losing sales to the Maverick:
Going back to the cargo van example, what numbers did the Ford Transit Connect do?
It did shitty. Less than half a million sold over 15 years of being on the market is pretty bad. How'd the full-size Transit do, once Ford brought it over stateside?
Would you look at that, it did fucking gangbusters. It managed to outsell its smaller and cheaper counterpart's entire 15-year run in less than five. This is the point: It's not that smaller work vehicles have simply never been an
option in the North American market, they just invariably end up not selling well enough to justify their own existence. There really wasn't a good reason to buy the smaller Transit Connect besides for some certain niche uses, like mail delivery or certain trades where you need tools but not a ton of material. But for the vast majority of the working class, your needs are almost guaranteed to be better suited by the larger, more capable Transit.
It wasn't just the Transit Connect, either. The Nissan NV200, the Chevrolet City Express, the Ram Promaster City, and the Mercedes-Benz Metris all populated the compact van segment just a few short years ago, and that entire vehicle segment has disappeared while ALL of their respective fullsize counterparts live on (except the Nissan NV). And this same dichotomy plays out in the entire North American market. People simply don't want smaller trucks, even when they're an option. There's almost nothing a small truck can do that a big truck can't do better.
So, what's the takeaway from this unreasonably long post about nothing? The point is that all these urbanist cucks whining about people buying big trucks because there's "no other option" are wrong and I'm tired of hearing about it. Manufacturers keep trying small trucks. They've been trying it for decades. Small trucks and vans have been on the North American market from practically every manufacturer at one point or another, and they almost invariably fail once people stop buying them. Small trucks like the Ranger or Tacoma got bigger because that's
just what people want. There's not some grandiose conspiracy of automakers trying to force John Q. Public behind the wheel of a Ram 2500. If anything, automakers keep
trying to get people to buy smaller versions of their offerings. But time and time again, they just don't, and they don't meet the sales figures required to justify continued production.
The "chicken tax" is an easy thing to tack the blame onto, but considering the fact that basically every meaningful foreign manufacturer has assembly plants under NAFTA jurisdiction, that's hardly a relevant factor anymore. Literally nothing is stopping any one of them (Toyota, Honda, Kia, Mercedes, Nissan, Volkswagen, Subaru, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, etc) from producing compact pickup trucks for the US market. The only reason they don't do that is because people simply do not buy the damn things.
christmas tree, six suitcases, and everybody's presents in the truck bed
