The Open Source American Kei Truck [video]
This video presents an open-source project to build a small American-made pickup truck inspired by Japanese Kei trucks, detailing its design, intended affordability, and the goal of making the plans freely available for anyone to construct.
Background
- Kei trucks are tiny, lightweight Japanese pickup trucks (under 660cc engine) originally built for Japan's "kei car" tax/insurance class. They're popular in the US as farm/off-road vehicles, but US safety and emissions rules make it hard to register them as road-legal daily drivers.
- This video covers a project building an "open source" Kei truck — meaning designs, plans, and schematics are freely shared so anyone can build or modify their own, rather than buying a proprietary vehicle from a single company.
- Open source in hardware works like open source software: the "source code" (blueprints, CAD files, wiring diagrams, BOM) is publicly available for anyone to use, improve, or manufacture.
- The project aims to make a modern, electric (or EV-converted) Kei truck that can actually be legally built and registered in the US, solving the regulatory barrier that stops imported Japanese mini-trucks from being daily drivers.
- The broader significance: it's an experiment in open-source vehicle design — can a community collaboratively build a safe, road-legal car from scratch, the way Linux or Wikipedia were built?