This review is scheduled to be complete next year and has the potential to freeze out full-size pickups designed with no consideration for things like European pedestrian safety. But part of the trade deal includes the EU recognizing US car standards, and US ambassador to the EU Andrew Puzder told the FT that “you can’t have low tariffs and massive non-tariff trade barriers and claim you’ve got a functioning relationship.”
Whatever the opposite of coals to Newcastle is
Of all the fights to pick to bring down an enormous trade deal, the fate of a few full-size pickup trucks seems pretty trivial. In the US, the width of our streets is mandated by fire departments. That’s why the average US residential road is 50-feet wide (15.2 m) and why US road lanes are typically 12 feet (3.6 m) wide compared to between 8.2-10.6 feet (2.5 m-3.2 m) for European roads. Parking spaces have similarly smaller footprints.
But are they popular? According to Transport and Environment, a UK-based advocacy group, almost 5,000 Ram pickups (which they erroneously call Dodge RAMs) were imported into the EU in 2023. T&E pointed out that this was a 20 percent increase over 2022 imports to the region, but it’s also helpful to know that total vehicle sales in the EU in 2023 topped 10.5 million units. T&E said that total pickup sales in 2023 were 7,000.
Looking beyond one brand but at just a single nation, in the same year, Germany bought a total of 3,291 pickup trucks out of 2.8 million new vehicles. So it’s pretty clear that most European car buyers have no interest in being fed a diet of oversized pickups that aren’t optimized for their roads and which are far more deadly to other road users than smaller and lighter crossovers and cars. The full-size pickup is little more than a niche vehicle in Europe.
But the big truck is evidently now emblematic of America and must be accepted by our trading partners, regardless of whether there’s customer demand. Unlike the EU, Japan acquiesced to US demands to accept US vehicle standards, and a potential Japanese government order for Ford F-150 trucks was praised by President Trump in October.
Matt Blunt, president of the American Automotive Policy Council, a lobbying group that has criticized the EU’s move to tighten IVA rules, told Ars that “these vehicles meet US safety standards and the proposed changes to the EU’s IVA regulation run directly counter to the commitments made in the US-EU Framework Agreement.” We’ve also reached out to Ford and GM and will update this article if we hear back.