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A 54-year-old man and his 78-year-old mother were killed after their car crashed head-on into a truck in Misaki, Tottori Prefecture, police said Monday.
According to police, the accident occurred at around 5 p.m. Sunday on National Route 179. Fuji TV reported that the car, driven by Hidemasa Yamamoto, hit an oncoming truck.
Yamamoto and his mother Chizuko, who had come from Hitachi in Ibaraki Prefecture, were killed. The 32-year-old driver of the truck was not injured, police said.
© Japan Today
6 Comments
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igloobuyer
Always the trucks. They are the most reckless driver sin Japan in my experience - they should be the most careful, but they're not.
Richard Wood
Quick to assume that the truck driver was at fault. No mention of truck driver being ticketed.
Stephan Lawarie
As usual, people know everything better than the police...........
Fadamor
Based on the wording of the article, it sounds like the car was at fault.
Had the truck been suspected of being at fault, that would have said, "after the truck crashed head-on into their car".
Joshua Garcia
how are cars not able to withstand front end collisions. Are truck drivers going 90 in japan or do the japanese straight up not have safety standards because a front impact dead on is supposed the most solved problem in car safety.
Balefire
@Joshua Garcia Sometimes it's not just the speed that's the problem. Some of the smaller vehicles here have considerably less mass than even a medium-sized truck, and are much less robust in construction. Relative heights and shapes of the vehicles involved can be significant factors, too. Modular design can help by absorbing some of the impact and reducing how much it's transmitted to other parts of the vehicle, but there are limits to everything.
Last summer the driver of a yellow-plate kei fell asleep at the wheel and suddenly crossed the center line, running into mostly the right front fender of my small-ish SUV (a Suzuki Escudo). We were doing 30 or 40 kph; she was going about 50. My car was damaged beyond economical repair although the airbags didn't even deploy, but hers was essentially turned into mangled junk. Luckily nobody was seriously injured (her airbags did deploy, and probably saved her from much worse than the bruising she received). Had she hit a 10- or 20-ton truck, I'd bet that the outcome would have been much grimmer.