Hello everyone, I’m going to give the written test for my driver’s license soon. Although I’m going to have English test papers, the designations (large, regular, special etc.) really confuse me. Can someone tell me what counts as a ‘regular’ automobile?
For example, my practice book tells me that vehicles weighing less than 8 tons and not more than 10 seats have a speed limit of 100 km/h on expressways, while vehicles over that limit is 80 km/h. But the test question comes as ‘the speed limit for all regular automobiles on the expressway is 100 km/h, true or false’ In this case I don’t know what counts as ‘regular’ because the book never explains it
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A regular or 普通 vehicle should just be referring to a typical passenger car, pickup truck, van, and the like. The other classes of vehicles would be like busses and cargo trucks- think commercial vehicles.
From [Japanese Wikipedia](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%99%AE%E9%80%9A%E8%87%AA%E5%8B%95%E8%BB%8A) translated to English:
> A motor vehicle that meets all of the following requirements: gross vehicle weight of less than 3,500 kg, maximum payload of less than 2,000 kg, and seating capacity of 10 passengers or less, and does not fall under any of the following categories: large-sized special motor vehicle, motorcycle (including specified motorcycle), or small-sized special motor vehicle.
Just think of “regular” as regular passenger vehicles that you can drive with a “regular” driver’s licence, as opposed to busses or trucks or motorcycles where you would need a different license to operate a non-regular vehicle.
The answer to your test question is “true”. I can’t imagine the handbook wouldn’t give you weight and size specifications for regular passenger vehicles but just by common sense you should know regular cars don’t weigh anywhere near 8 tons. That’s like the weight of 3-4 regular passenger vehicles.
Wait, you can do the test in English ??
Hi. Interesting question. I am going for my second attempt at this test tomorrow morning, so it is very much on my mind. I strongly recommend the Nagoya/Toyota books by the way. They have a complete explanation of the classification.
An “automobile” is the word my book uses to translate “自動車” which is essentially everything other than streetcars, light vehicles (such as bicycles, wheeled walkers and so on) and mopeds. It then divides automobiles into a set of classes, which does include “regular motor vehicles” which may be what the question is referring to.
The rule is that regular motor vehicles have a maximum speed limit of 100km/h on a national expressway (ignoring special situations such as where there is no separation between opposite direction lanes) except for three-wheeled regular motor vehicles which have 80km/h (along with large-size trucks, medium trucks with a gross weight of 8 tons or more, maximum payload of 5 tons or more and seating capacity of 11 passengers or more, special heavy equipment and towing vehicles (i.e. those adapted for towing).
Obviously you can’t drive vehicles towing broken down vehicles on an expressway, any more than you can minicars, special light equipment or some regular motorcycles.
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