On Wednesday, during a private fundraising event in Missouri, President Trump accused Japan of using so-called “bowling ball tests” on U.S. imports.

The topic President Trump was touching on was how Japan is keeping U.S. automakers from selling cars in the Land of the Rising Sun, stating that the “bowling ball test” was one of the mechanisms used, as reported by The Washington Post.

Afterwards, during a White House briefing, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made it clear that Trump was just joking, stating: “Obviously, he is joking about this particular test but it illustrates the creative ways some countries are able to keep American goods out of their markets.”

Was he actually joking though? Here’s the full extent of what he said during the Missouri event:

“We send a car to Japan, they analyze it for four weeks before they decide to send it back because it’s not environmentally friendly. One of the car companies actually had a car made and it was the most environmentally perfect car, cost them a fortune. They spent a fortune. But they wanted to see if they could get it in [to Japan]. And it, they were going crazy. Four days went by. Then five days. And they were ready to approve it and they said, no,no, we have to do one more test.”

“It’s called the bowling-ball test, do you know what that is? That’s where they take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and they drop it on the hood of the car. And if the hood dents, then the car doesn’t quality. It’s horrible, the way we’re treated. It’s horrible.”

We must say, those are a lot of intricate details for a joke, with an estimated distance and everything – as if a bowling ball wouldn’t dent the hood of any car from almost any distance.

What Trump was trying to relay was the fact that American cars are being forced to pass impossible tests, although in reality, the closest thing to a bowling ball test is Japan’s pedestrian head protection performance test, where a sensor-filled hemisphere-shaped device is fired at the hood and windshield of a car.

Here’s the gist of it:

 

So for an adult head impact, the weight is 4.5 kg (10 lbs), whereas a bowling ball weighs around 7.2 kg (16 lbs).

Another thing we have to point out is the fact that a car’s hood is supposed to crumple under pressure, quite easily actually – so as to absorb the energy of a person’s head in case the vehicle strikes a pedestrian.

In the end, joke or not, it didn’t make much sense, not even as an analogy for some type of hurdle American automakers need to overcome.