Kei Truck Price Index: One Importer's Asking Prices

There is no national price index for kei trucks in the United States. No central body records what they change hands for, and the figures that circulate in forums and marketplace listings are individual anecdotes stacked into an impression. What follows is not that index either — it is something narrower and, we would argue, more useful: the complete asking-price distribution of one importer's inventory, published in full, with the sample size next to every number.

The headline spread

All figures cover vehicles of model year 2001 and earlier — the 25-year-rule imports, which is what almost everybody means by "a kei truck". Our late-model and new stock is a different product at a different price and is reported separately further down.

Read that as a shape rather than a number. The median is $6,900, but a quarter of the lot sits below the 25th percentile and a quarter above the 75th, and the gap between $3,920 and $39,995 spans an older two-wheel-drive flat-bed at one end and a specialist body or a collector vehicle at the other. Those are not the same product and no single average describes them both.

Of the 868 import-era vehicles on the lot, 300 read “Contact for price” rather than carrying a figure — most of them came across from our sister lot already marked that way. Those are excluded from every table on this page, and it is a large enough share that you should hold the whole index a little more loosely than the sample size alone would suggest. There are 949 vehicles in stock in total.

By model line

This is the breakdown people ask for most, and the one to treat most carefully: what separates these medians is as much which examples of each model we happen to hold as anything intrinsic to the model. A batch of low-mileage four-wheel-drive Sambars moves the Sambar median without anything changing about Sambars.

Model lines with fewer than five priced examples are omitted rather than shown with a meaningless median. Counts are of priced vehicles only.

The model pages behind those links carry the live grid for each one — Acty, Carry, Hijet, Sambar, Minicab — and the comparison guide covers what actually distinguishes them mechanically.

By body type

Body type separates the lot more cleanly than model name does. A flat-bed kei truck and a hydraulic dump truck are different vehicles with different hardware, and the prices say so.

The dump-bodied trucks carry a ram, a reinforced bed and often a heavier chassis, which is where that premium comes from; the payload guide makes the case for when it is worth paying. If you want to see them, they are in mini dump trucks.

The body type recorded here is the one on the vehicle's own documentation, which is why the categories are a little uneven — "Van" and "Kei Van" are recorded distinctly by the source paperwork and we have not merged them, because merging them would be us editing the data rather than reporting it.

By drivetrain

Restricted to flat-bed and dump-bodied trucks, since mixing vans and cars into a drivetrain comparison tells you about body type instead.

Four-wheel drive lists higher, consistently and by a wide margin. Be careful about the inference, though. This is a difference between two groups of listings, not a measured premium on one otherwise-identical truck: the four-wheel-drive vehicles we hold also tend to be the ones specified with a hi/low transfer case, a diff lock and air conditioning, and some of that spread is those options rather than the front axle. If your ground is unpaved it is still the money to spend — if you are only ever on tarmac, two-wheel drive is the same truck for less.

Where a listing's drivetrain field is empty we read the drive from the listing title, which carries it on most of the stock that came across from our sister lot. Vehicles where neither source states it get their own row rather than being dropped, so you can see how much of the sample the comparison above is actually resting on.

By odometer

These are 25-to-35-year-old working vehicles, and the odometer is the single most informative number on the listing after the drivetrain.

The broad direction is what you would expect — lower readings cost more — but the relationship is not clean, and we are not going to pretend it is. The highest-mileage band does not sit lowest, because a handful of specialist and collector vehicles with high readings sit in it and pull the median up. That is a property of this inventory, not a fact about kei trucks, and it is exactly the kind of thing an index built from one lot will do.

One genuine caution about the readings themselves. Japanese odometers record kilometres; the figures we hold are converted to miles. Conversion is arithmetic and reliable. What it cannot tell you is whether a 1994 truck showing 40,000 miles has done 40,000 miles or 140,000 — on a vehicle this old, from a market with no central mileage register, the reading is evidence rather than proof. Treat it as one input among the photographs, the service history and the inspection.

By model year, including the late-model stock

This table is the only one that reaches past 2001, and it is here to show you why the rest of the page does not.

The 2002-and-newer row is a different business. Those are late-model and new vehicles — not 25-year-rule imports — bought for off-road and property work, and they sit several times above the import-era stock. Averaging them in with a 1995 Acty would produce a number that describes nothing, which is why every other table on this page stops at 2001.

Within the import era itself, note that the oldest band is not the cheapest. The 1988–1994 vehicles on our lot include a disproportionate number of collector and specialist pieces — fire vehicles, Climbers, low-mileage survivors — and they hold the median up. Again: a property of this sample, not a law about age.

What this data cannot tell you

We would rather state the limits than have them found.

• These are asking prices. Not sale prices, not auction results, not appraised values. We do not publish what any individual vehicle finally sold for.
• It is one seller. Our stock is a sample of the US kei truck market, not a census of it. Our sourcing, our inspection standard and our free nationwide delivery are all priced in, and another importer's distribution would differ.
• It is one moment. Every figure is recomputed when the page loads. It is a snapshot, not a time series, and this page carries no history.
• It says nothing about condition. Price here tracks recorded facts — drivetrain, body, odometer, year. Mechanical condition is not a number we hold, and it is the variable that matters most.
• It says nothing about running costs. We hold no measured fuel economy, no top speed, no payload test data and no reliability record for any vehicle on the lot, so none of that is here.

If you are citing this

Please use wording along these lines, and please keep the caveat attached:

If you need the underlying breakdown in a different cut, or a figure as of a particular date, ask us — we would rather supply it than have it estimated.

Before you use any of this to buy

One thing no price table settles. Importing a 25-year-old kei truck is legal in all fifty states; registering one for public roads is not, and several states refuse outright — including New York, where we are based. Check the state-by-state guide before you commit money, because it is the one variable that can make an otherwise excellent price irrelevant.

From there: the cost guide explains what moves a kei truck's price and what to expect to pay for what, the chassis and engine code reference decodes what you are looking at, and the full inventory is where the numbers above come from.