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The story
A dashcam clip showing a passenger car colliding with a truck as it tried to squeeze past the truck’s left side mid-turn has been posted to 5ch, sparking a debate over “who’s really at fault.” Opinions split over the truck’s off-tracking (the wider swing a long vehicle’s rear wheels take on a turn), the timing of its lane-straddling, and exactly when the turn signal came on, with users disagreeing on how the blame should be split.
So who’s in the wrong here?
Source: video.twimg.com / original clip here
What people said
Hint: off-tracking (the rear wheels swinging wide on a turn)
Have you never driven a car?
You see this a lot with motorcyclists in videos like this.
Even on a bike, trying to pass a left-turning vehicle on its left makes no sense.
That's my take as a big-bike rider myself — and I say it knowing full well there are plenty of idiot bikers who pull that dangerous move. Bikes getting caught in a vehicle's blind spot mid-turn isn't even rare.
You should just hand in your license.
Wait, did you read "I could see it" as "I can comprehend it," instead of what I meant — that this kind of idiocy is common with bikes but rare with regular cars?
If you put your blinker on early enough, a bike basically never cuts in.
Most bikers think passing a left-turning vehicle on the left is out of the question, so they see the signal and back off from passing, right? Does that even count as a counterargument?
Wouldn't a 4-ton truck need about this much clearance? Bus drivers turn with roughly this much off-tracking too, don't they?
A 4-tonner or a bus wouldn't need this much. Judging by the steering radius, this looks trailer-sized.
I drive a 4-tonner and I could make this turn without swinging out that far. This is a full-size large truck.
People who are bad at left turns seem like they can't do anything right.
How do you go from this situation to thinking "I'll just pass while it's turning left!"…
Of course the blinker should already be on the moment you start straddling the lane to account for off-tracking before a left turn. It'd be weirder to straddle the lane for no reason at all.
There wasn't even room to pass on the left until right before the intersection anyway.
It straddled about half the lane for a good stretch and was moving at decent speed, so yeah, there was a real chance of it being mistaken for a forgotten blinker. If it had clearly slowed down, stuck to the left lane, and crept into the turn, it probably would've gotten the rear-end ruled fully the other car's fault.
Do that and cars start passing on the right instead, and then it can't swing wide at the intersection. Straddling the lane is basically saying "don't come up on either side." The blinker was on properly too, so any normal driver behind should've picked up on that signal.
Then what Re: #50 is saying doesn't add up.
If every single driver were smart, this would probably be the ideal way to drive. Doesn't hurt fuel economy, and it makes it easy for cars behind to merge right without braking. But the painful part is there's always a certain percentage of idiots on public roads, so you have to drive around them too.
You sound like you'd be a bad driver.
If it's necessary to avoid danger or to complete a turn, it doesn't count as running the yellow in the first place, so that's fine.
The problem is that theoretically sound driving doesn't line up with current law and legal precedent. The rule as written basically says "wait however long it takes until you can turn safely," so there's nothing to be done about it.
You can't make a left turn onto a narrow road in a truck unless you assume the drivers behind you are being smart about it. So what, sit there before the turn until there's nobody behind you? Depending on traffic, you'd never get to turn at all.
Signaling your intent doesn't mean you can do whatever you want after that. The rule is to pay full attention to your left rear and turn carefully regardless of whether the other driver has actually understood your intent.
That's exactly the "painful" part I was talking about. Read more carefully.
It was paying attention. In this video, the car rammed into the gap while the truck was mid-swing. Do you not even know what a left blinker means? It's what you turn on when you're about to turn left. There's no accounting for some idiot who tries to pass on the left of a car that's turning left — that car wasn't even visible in the mirror until the truck started turning.
You're the one making the irregular move of swinging right before a left turn, so it's easy to see how that could turn into "turning left across the path of a car going straight on your right."
A large truck doesn't get judged that way.
A large vehicle swinging right before a left turn is completely normal — is there really someone out there who thinks that's irregular?
Even driving that's 100% logically justified can still get you assigned partial fault if there's an accident. That's why driving a truck properly, if you actually take it seriously, is genuinely brutal.
Well, obviously lol. When you're driving you just have to pray there are no idiots around you. There's no predicting what an idiot will do.
Background and Key Points
Japan settles fender-benders like this one through a semi-formalized system, not case-by-case judge intuition. Insurers lean on a standard reference (often called the “kashitsu wariai” fault-ratio tables, published in a compendium of past rulings) that assigns baseline splits for common accident types — rear-ending a turning vehicle, passing on the inside, and so on — then adjusts up or down for specifics like signal timing and lane position. Large trucks and buses are also legally expected to swing wide to the right before a left turn because of off-tracking: their rear wheels track a tighter radius than the front, so without that swing the trailer or rear body would mount the curb or clip whatever is on the corner. Drivers behind are supposed to read that rightward drift plus a left blinker as “this vehicle is completing a left turn,” not as an invitation to undertake.
The thread’s real disagreement isn’t over who gets blamed in the abstract — everyone agrees the passing car erred — it’s over how much fault the truck should still absorb for straddling the lane at speed for an extended stretch before finally slowing into the turn, versus signaling and swinging exactly as procedure requires. That’s a matter of degree the posters can’t resolve from one clip.
What the thread never brings up is that Japanese insurers rarely rule 100%-0% in cases like this; even a technically correct maneuver typically draws a small percentage of fault (often cited informally as 10-ish for the turning vehicle) once the accident tables are applied, precisely because full avoidance was theoretically possible. Readers expecting a clean verdict from the footage alone are likely to be disappointed by how these are actually settled.
*This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “Truck: “I’m turning left!” Regular car: “I’m going straight!” ← the result lolololololololol.”
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