In Rhode Island, there are around 30 small cars called kei cars. Lawmakers want to stop people from driving them. They’re telling kei car owners to give back their registration, which means they can’t drive their cars on public roads anymore.
Rhode Island leaders first talked about banning kei cars in 2021. They brought it up again in 2024. The head of the DMV, Walter Craddock, thinks kei cars should be banned because they don’t meet the safety rules for cars in the U.S. Federal law says you can bring in any car that’s at least 25 years old, but each state can decide what cars are okay to drive.
People are mostly talking about trucks like the Honda Acty, but the ban is for any kind of kei car. If you have a Suzuki Cappuccino or an Autozam AZ-1 and you want to register it in Rhode Island, you won’t be able to soon. But there’s a small chance things might change. Two lawmakers, Senator Lou DiPalma and Representative Michelle McGaw, want to make a law. It would let people who registered a kei car before August 1, 2021, keep driving it legally.
Even if this law passes, you couldn’t sell a kei car in Rhode Island. And you couldn’t drive it on fast roads. The DMV doesn’t like this law idea.
Other states are dealing with similar problems. Maine started taking away registrations for Mitsubishi Delica vans in 2021. They’re not kei cars, but they’re Japanese cars that don’t follow American rules. Texas tried not letting people register kei cars, but owners fought back. Georgia and New York banned people from registering kei cars too.
