Frequently Asked Questions

US federal law blocks the import of a motor vehicle that was not built to the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. The exception that matters here is the declaration at 49 CFR 591.5(i), which covers a vehicle that is "25 or more years old". Kei trucks were built for the Japanese market and never certified to US standards, so that declaration is the route almost all of them come in on.

The exemption turns on the age of the vehicle, not on a number in an advert. If a vehicle sits close to the line, ask us for its details before you commit.

No. Of the 945 vehicles listed right now, 944 state a model year: 864 of those are from 2001 or earlier and 80 are newer than that. Model years across the listing run from 1983 to 2025.

The 25-year exemption does not apply to the newer ones, and a different set of federal rules does. Ask us about the specific vehicle you are looking at before you buy, and confirm with your own state what you would be able to do with it.

We do. We import the vehicles and handle the customs and title paperwork on the import side. You are buying from stock that is already here, not placing a build-and-ship order with Japan — which is why delivery is measured in days rather than months.

Two declarations sit behind every import. The safety side is the declaration required by 49 CFR 591.5, filed with US Customs and Border Protection at the time the vehicle is offered for importation. The emissions side is EPA Declaration Form 3520-1, "Importation of Motor Vehicles and Motor Vehicle Engines Subject to Federal Air Pollution Regulations", which 19 CFR 12.73(i)(3)(ii) requires to be filed with CBP electronically through ACE or on paper.

For a 25-year declaration specifically, 49 CFR 591.6 does not call for an additional supporting document to be attached to it. All of this is our side of the transaction.

Emissions are handled by EPA and are separate from the safety rules. In its published guidance on importing older vehicles, EPA states that it "has long interpreted the equivalence requirement to mean that the engine must be identical to the engine that was originally installed", and it asks importers to contact its Imports Hotline before shipping such vehicles. An engine swap on an import is therefore a complication rather than a selling point.

Most of our listings show the engine code. E07A and E07Z are Honda units, EN07 is Subaru, EF is Daihatsu, F6A is Suzuki and 3G83 is Mitsubishi — all of them 660 cc three-cylinders.

Tell us what you are after — make, model, year range, drivetrain, transmission, budget — and we will tell you what we can do rather than guess at it. Call (640) 203-5504, Monday to Saturday 9am to 6pm CST, or send it through the contact form.

Titling and registration for imported kei trucks are decided state by state, and the rules are not uniform. We do not publish a state-by-state list on this site, because a confident wrong answer here costs you real money.

Tell us your state through the contact page and we will tell you what we know and, just as importantly, what we do not. Check with your own titling agency before you order. We cannot promise a registration outcome for any vehicle.

A bill of sale from us, plus the ownership and import documents that belong to that particular vehicle. The exact set varies from one vehicle to the next, so ask us for the document list for the one you are considering before you order — we would rather tell you up front than have you find out at a service counter.

Our terms put the boundary plainly: we provide documentation to support titling and registration, and street-legal eligibility and registration requirements vary by state and are the buyer’s responsibility to confirm with local authorities.

No. Titling and registration happen in your state, in your name, using the documents supplied with the vehicle. Applicable taxes, title and registration fees are the buyer’s responsibility, and we do not collect or estimate them.

Not in the US format. NHTSA standardised the 17-character VIN for vehicles sold in the United States in 1981; Japanese-market kei trucks carry a chassis code and serial number instead, written like DB52T-109625.

You can see it in our own data: of the 746 identification numbers recorded across current listings, only 2 run to 17 characters. The rest are chassis codes, typically ten to thirteen characters long. That code is the one parts suppliers ask for, so keep it somewhere you can find it.

The steering wheel and the controls around it sit on the right; the pedals stay in the order you already know. Most people are comfortable within a day of local driving. What stays awkward is everything a left-hand-drive country builds at kerb height — drive-through windows, ATMs, parking-gate ticket machines and roadside mailboxes all end up on the passenger side.

The other real difference is overtaking on a two-lane road, because you are sitting on the wrong side to see past the vehicle in front. The indicator and wiper stalks are usually swapped relative to a US car, so expect to wash the windscreen every time you turn for the first week.

Both turn up, because we publish the reading as it was recorded rather than converting it. Of the 945 vehicles listed, 432 state the odometer in kilometres, 172 in miles and 337 as a plain number with no unit given; the rest show no reading at all. If the unit matters to your decision, ask us before you order and we will check the vehicle.

To convert, multiply kilometres by 0.62: 100,000 km is roughly 62,000 miles. Japanese-market speedometers are marked in km/h as well, where 60 mph is about 97 km/h.

Kei vehicles are built to a Japanese size and engine class. Since 1 October 1998 that class has allowed a maximum length of 3.4 m, width of 1.48 m, height under 2.0 m and engine displacement under 660 cc, and Japanese manufacturers separately agreed a maximum output of 64 PS (63 hp) — kei trucks sit well under that ceiling.

The result is a vehicle geared for town, farm and job-site speeds. Some will hold a highway speed, but none of them were designed around doing it for an hour at a stretch, and they predate the crash standards a modern pickup is built to. If a highway commute is the plan, say so and we will tell you honestly whether the vehicle suits it.

The class is built around a bed rating of 350 kg, roughly 770 lb. Treat that as the design intent rather than a target to hit — a truck with decades of work behind it deserves some margin. Bed dimensions and any load figures we hold are shown on the individual listing.

We do not publish tow ratings. These vehicles were not sold with US-style trailer tow ratings, so any figure we quoted would be invented. Ask us about the specific vehicle, and check what your own state allows to be towed by what before you plan around it.

Good at: moving material short distances, working in tight spaces, orchard and vineyard rows, campsites, hunting leases, job sites, grounds and facilities work, and running cheaply on a 660 cc engine. A kei truck goes down paths a full-size pickup cannot and parks where it cannot.

Bad at: long highway journeys, heavy or bulky loads, towing, and occupant protection measured against a modern truck — the 25-year exemption exists precisely because these vehicles were never built to US safety standards. They are excellent at the job they were designed for and mediocre outside it, and it is worth buying one on that basis.

Both exist in stock. Of the 945 vehicles listed, 505 are recorded as 4WD and 175 as two-wheel drive, and on gearboxes 684 are listed as manual against 171 automatic. The remainder do not state it.

Drivetrain, transmission, engine code, colour and odometer appear on each listing where we have them. A blank field means we do not have that detail recorded, not that we are holding it back; ask and we will go and look.

Service parts are the easy part, because these trucks used a small number of engine families for a long time. Suzuki’s 657 cc F6A carried the Carry through two generations from 1990 into the late 1990s, and Daihatsu’s EF-series 659/658 cc three-cylinder ran in the Hijet from around 1990 until the KF engine replaced it in 2014. Filters, belts, plugs, brake and clutch parts consequently cross over between a lot of model years.

Body panels, glass, lamps, trim and interior parts are the harder half. They are model-specific and sourcing them usually means a longer wait, so if cosmetic condition matters to you, buy the tidier vehicle rather than planning to fix one later.

Mechanically they are conventional: a small three-cylinder petrol engine, a manual or automatic gearbox, ordinary brakes and suspension. Any competent independent shop can handle routine service on one.

The friction is lookup rather than wrenching. US parts catalogues are not indexed by Japanese chassis codes and factory documentation is in Japanese, so hand your shop the chassis code from the listing before the first service and the job gets considerably easier.

Almost everything we list is a 660 cc gasoline three-cylinder, and the engine code on the listing tells you which one. A small number of larger vehicles in the catalogue differ, so check the listing or ask if it matters.

Vehicles currently listed with a price run from $3,920 to $39,995, with a midpoint around $7,795; 388 of them are under $10,000. Some listings carry no price, in which case call us.

On top of the vehicle: $350 delivery per vehicle, then whatever your state charges in taxes, title and registration fees, which are the buyer’s responsibility. Then normal old-vehicle budgeting — fluids, filters, tyres, brakes — and the fact that the vehicle is paid for in full before it is dispatched, by card or bank transfer.

A $500 deposit per vehicle at checkout takes it off the market, and we then contact you to arrange the balance and the delivery. You can also pay in full at checkout instead — the vehicles plus $350 delivery each, in a single payment.

Card or bank transfer. Card payments — Visa, Mastercard and American Express — run through Stripe’s hosted checkout, so your card details never reach us. For a bank transfer, ACH or wire, we email you our details and a reference and hold the vehicle for five days while the funds clear.

We sell for payment in full — we are not a lender and we do not arrange lending through anyone else. If you need to borrow to buy, arrange that with your own bank or credit union before you order.

A flat $350 per vehicle to all 50 states. Each vehicle travels on its own trailer, so two vehicles is $700 rather than $350. Delivery is door to door and typically arrives one to three days after dispatch; as our terms note, that timing is an estimate and can move for reasons outside our control. There is more detail on the shipping page.

You get a confirmation email. If you paid a deposit we contact you to arrange the balance and confirm the delivery address; if you paid in full we move to dispatch. You can look your order up at any point at /order/success/ using the email address you used at checkout — it shows where the vehicle is going and what the next step is. If you chose a bank transfer, your payment details and reference sit at /order/transfer/ behind the same email lookup.

Every listing carries photographs and 432 of the 945 currently include video. If you want more photos, a closer look at a specific area, or an answer about something the listing does not cover, ask — call (640) 203-5504, Monday to Saturday 9am to 6pm CST, or email sales@truckbedcentral.com.

We are at 1560 Aurora Ave Ln, Aurora, IL 60505. Contact us first if you want to arrange anything in person.

Yes. Send the make, model, year and a few photographs through the sell page and we will come back to you with an offer. If you are trading against something in stock, say which vehicle so we can quote the two sides together.

Every vehicle is inspected before it is loaded on a trailer — all of them, not a sample. If something turns up on a vehicle you have already ordered, you hear about it from us before it is dispatched rather than after it arrives.

Beyond that, these are used Japanese imports and condition varies genuinely from one to the next. Each listing carries the model year, the odometer reading and its units, drivetrain, transmission and photographs of the actual vehicle. Ask us about a specific one before you order — that is a more useful answer than any blanket statement about the catalogue.

What applies is set out in our terms. These are used imported vehicles, most of them older than 25 years, so ask about the specific vehicle before you order rather than relying on a blanket statement about the catalogue.