You can tell a lot about a country, and the people who live in it, by the cars they choose to drive. Cars are extensions of popular culture, national character rendered in metal and glass.
The Americans have always gone big. Shiny. Loud. They invented the muscle car, and they call their SUVs trucks. The Germans turned their worldview into machinery: over-engineered, sober, precise. The Italians chose panache over practicality and speed over almost everything else; their cars do not just move fast, they feel fast even when parked. The Soviets built cars the way they built cities, boxy and unremarkable and tough as bolts, machines that cared nothing for desire and everything for survival. The British did a bit of everything, but if there is one thing they truly nailed, it is the classic roadster: slightly impractical, slightly romantic, best enjoyed under grey skies. And the Japanese, practical before anything else, gave us the Kei car. Tiny, utilitarian and quietly brilliant, these things look like someone took a sedan and squished it to half its size.
You may have seen them without quite registering them. Japan was all over everyone’s feed in 2025: influencers on shinkansens, queues curling out of ramen shops, and the yen at its weakest in decades, which turned the whole country into a bargain. I was one of many Indians who made a beeline for it last year.
Japan is like nowhere else on the planet. Vending machines that serve hot soup and neckties. People who queue without being told to. Trains you can set your watch by. It is also, quietly, a paradise for anyone who loves old cars. On Tokyo’s roads, supercars share space with mint-condition taxis that are twenty years old. Purists in turbocharged go-karts overtake lovingly modified relics from the seventies. In Kyoto on a Sunday, the streets fill with vintage cars out for a scoot. But wherever you go in this country, one thing stays constant. The Kei cars are everywhere.
Tiny, city-friendly and subsidised into cult status, they are boxy, charming and endlessly zippy. They simply make sense in cities where space is the most expensive thing going. By that logic they should have done well in India too. We even had our own versions, the Nano and the Reva, and neither ever caught on.
It turns out to be a culture thing. In Delhi, a man’s worth is quietly measured by the real estate his ride occupies. Maruti once built a four-door Jimny more or less for India, a brilliant, genuinely fun little car, and it never took off the way it deserved to. Put the same machine in front of Japanese buyers and it was booked solid for months.
For years I drove a Hindustan Motors Ambassador, a gorgeous artefact from a simpler, more mechanical time. I loved that car. I had to give her up because of a rather arbitrary law in Delhi, and honestly, do not get me started.
So when I got back from Japan, I went hunting for the closest thing we have to a Kei car. I found it in the MG Comet. A month in, it has been a revelation.
It is small in exactly the way Delhi refuses to respect and Tokyo would instantly understand. It slots into gaps that other cars have to think about, tucks into parking spaces they circle and abandon, and asks almost nothing of me in return. A month of living with it has not so much converted me to smallness as reminded me that the case for it was always sound. We just never wanted to hear it. Maybe that is finally changing. Maybe a country that measures status in square footage is ready, at last, for a small car that makes big sense. Or maybe I am simply the happy exception, aiming my little box through a city built for something much larger.