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The story
Luxury car rental services aimed at foreign visitors to Japan are gaining popularity. Some tourists reportedly rent a Ferrari or similar car for around ¥300,000 a day and tour Hakone, Kyoto, Naoshima, and other destinations at their own pace. On 5ch, reactions to the price tag were split — some said “that’s pocket change for rich people over there,” others argued “it just looks cheap because of the weak yen” — and the conversation spread to how rental insurance works, road sign wording, and comparisons between Japanese and foreign cars.
What people said
The journey itself has become the highlight of the trip.
A young couple who visited from France in August spent three weeks touring Hakone (Kanagawa Prefecture), Toba (Mie Prefecture), Kyoto, and Naoshima (Kagawa Prefecture), starting out from Tokyo.
Japan's turned into a cheap country.
Is the average salary over there ¥400 million or something?
Ma-ku Soo-zu (more nonsense gibberish riffing on the same joke)
Overseas, that'd be less than a month's salary.
In America, that's about what a part-time office cleaning lady makes in a year.
Japanese urban planning just threw math out the window and did whatever it wanted, so of course it feels like another world lol
Actually it's the opposite — it's popular because it's a dated, 50-year-old relic with retro charm.
Unknown drivers, unknown skill level, foreign nationals — isn't the risk too high to insure?
There's a kind of throwaway term insurance made for rental cars.
Minor damage falls under the deductible, so it's a scheme that keeps the insurance company nicely profitable too.
There are so many traffic lights that even after it passes you, it's stopped again at the next light — cracks me up
First time seeing this one — is it copypasta?
If it's not copypasta, I seriously hope I never end up thinking like that.
You'd have to strip it down and ship it piece by piece by sea freight, so that's not happening.
Those days of Japanese fans gloating over the GT-R are long gone.
To begin with, Japan hasn't really built a proper sports car in like the last 20 years.
It's all stuff like slapping a new body on a German car and calling it a Supra.
With the GT-R, Nissan was pulling shady stuff like bringing non-stock cars in for testing, so I can't stand Nissan.
As of September 2026, both the "fastest production car at the Nürburgring" and the "fastest production EV" records are held not by Xiaomi but by the Porsche Taycan Turbo GT (with the Manthey Performance Kit).
"Xiaomi apparently holds the fastest production-car Nürburgring lap now" was accurate as of mid-2025, but by 2026 that's already a generation out of date.
They can't even read the road signs.
That's why there's a push to internationalize road signs too.
With the weak yen, Japan can't survive without inbound tourism money.
Writing it in romaji doesn't help if it's not actually in English! How road sign wording has quietly been changing as more foreign tourists visit
https://www.webcartop.jp/2024/09/1438508/amp/
Plenty of Japanese people drive rental cars when they travel abroad too, though.
Way more legit than those Mario Kart street-go-kart tours anyway.
If you take a Ferrari on the expressway, isn't it too low to the ground to actually see the scenery?
Seems like a minivan would give you a better view.
For a Japanese person it'd feel more like ¥30,000.
I hear a small bottle of Coke can run about ¥1,700 overseas.
I'd call this a bargain.
The 1964 Dodge 330 that inspired 'Christine'
https://ailovei.com/?p=86795
A notorious car whose owners reportedly died — 14 of them.
https://w.atwiki.jp/niconicomugen/pages/11680.html
'The Car' — Lincoln Continental
'Christine' — Plymouth Fury
Gotta love it. Modern America's rotting away with nothing but SUVs.
Give me the good old sedan era any day.
Background and Key Points of This Topic
Luxury car rentals for foreign visitors have expanded alongside the growth of experience-based inbound tourism spending, and tourists holding an International Driving Permit (IDP) can get behind the wheel on public roads as soon as they arrive in Japan. Commenters on the thread repeatedly pointed out that the ¥300,000-a-day price tag looks relatively affordable to wealthy travelers from abroad given how sharply the yen has weakened. Rental companies structure dedicated insurance policies to cover an unspecified pool of drivers, typically charging higher premiums in exchange for a lower deductible — coverage isn’t determined by a driver’s nationality. There’s also a broader push across Japan to add more English and romanized text to road signs as the number of foreign visitors grows, and the article a commenter linked to is one example of that trend. That said, how affordable the price feels or how driving manners are judged varies a lot by individual perspective, so some of the thread’s more definitive claims should be taken with a grain of salt.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Breaking News Plus) thread “[Inbound Tourism] Ferrari Rentals at ¥300,000 a Day a Hit with Visitors to Japan — The Drive Itself Is the Highlight of the Trip.”
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