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Another problem with this idea that isn't mentioned in the article, comments I've yet seen:
Japan has well maintained road infrastructure in their urban areas.
The US does not.
Hit an American pot hole in one of these things, now its time for a completely new suspension, if you haven't totalled the car.
A sad kind of self reinforcing logic of giganto cars and trucks everywhere is that they massively worsen and degrade road quality far more than conventional sized cars..., yet they're also the only things big enough to be more likely to shrug off the effects from the very damage their rampant overuse causes.
The other problem of course is that these are so small, that with as many SUVS and literal WW2 tank sized trucks as we have, they would be be unsafe... you just can't defeat the mass and kinetic energy difference involved in a collision when the thing hitting you weighs, I dunno, 5x as much.
You could theoretically, say, totally revamp NSHTA and the CAFE standards, and pass something like a tax on heavier cars used for personal transit... and use that to subsidize/kickstart/incentivize domestic kei car manufacturing...
... but that would require an actual competent set of planners, and a functional government.
Which we obviously don't have.
So we're not even at step 0, not even at step -1, we are currently still undergoing an unprecedented constitutional crisis, debt/currency crisis, and general economic collapse.
Might maybe just wanna think about laying the foundation before doing the electrical.