Law-abiding Japanese car enthusiasts are having their rights stripped away in state after state because a group of pencil-pushing nobodies with nothing better to do keeps poking their noses in it. The non-profit non-government lobbying group the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators has been involved in the banning of Kei cars and other legal imports to Rhode Island, Georgia, Maine, and Massachusetts, and now have their sights set on Colorado. The Colorado DMV is weighing a proposal to revoke existing Kei vehicle titles and registrations and deny future registrations.
As it stands Colorado allows vehicles like this to be titled and registered under “Non-Traditional Vehicle Title and Registration” and a new proposal aims to stamp out that particular piece of the Colorado road code. The Colorado DMV’s proposal explicitly names the AAMVA as the source of the potential ruling, which, depending on your reading of the law, could also push out any imported vehicle, kit-built vehicle, former military vehicles, and other “non-conventional” vehicles altogether.
By the logic of the proposed legislation, anything that wasn’t designed to meet current U.S. Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards is likely to be outlawed in the state.
“The purpose of this rule is to clarify whether or not an unconventional (or not clearly defined) vehicle is eligible for an on-highway title and/or registration or an off-highway title based on whether it meets the statutory definitions in sections 42-1-102 and 42-6-102, C.R.S. for certain vehicle types.”
Obviously, 25-year-old Kei cars don’t meet FMVSS regulations, but imported cars from any other country don’t either. This rule, if made law, would actually defer to the AMVAA to rule on whether a car fits their classification of legal or not before issuing a license. In the case of non-traditional vehicles DMV employees, that is workers paid by the state to work for the people of the state, are told to weigh a vehicle “whether granting a title and registration would be consistent with best practices promulgated by AAMVA.”
According to a few Reddit threads Colorado’s Department of Revenue has already begun denying kei-jidōsha vehicles renewals and registrations, even without the new rule being written into the legal code. They simply “won’t issue a title,” says one user, and another claims his 1997 Suzuki Carry has been denied registration as well. A non-government agency is going state by state to try to strip you of your right to legally register a vehicle you own and imported within the rules of the law. And in some cases, apparently going around the law to push state employees to deny that registration before the law is even on the books. That’s freedom, baby!
