road rage title

It just goes to show: put behind the wheel of a powerful car, even the normally mild-mannered Japanese can lose their cool.

Uploaded to YouTube by a Japanese Internet user last week, the following video was captured by a camera mounted to the dashboard of a powerful sedan/saloon. Cut off by the driver of a black Suzuki Wagon-R moments after passing a toll booth, the female driver leans on her horn while pursuing the much smaller vehicle at high speed.

According to information provided by the original YouTube poster, the incident took place on the Shin-Shonan bypass, a toll road in Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan, on January 28 (they note that the date shown on the video is incorrect). After passing through the automated toll gate, the black Wagon-R Stingray kei car (a class of light automobile featuring a compact design and smaller engine) appears from the left and pulls in front of the video-capturing driver to overtake a truck. After shrieking in horror and shouting “Baka!” (idiot), the driver revs her engine and the chase begins.

Japanese Internet users were quick to critique the driver for her over-reaction:

“Oi! You’re the dangerous one here!!”

“If the other guy had been driving a car like yours, I bet you wouldn’t bother chasing them!”

“Okaaay, slight over-reaction maybe!?”

“You’re the ‘baka’! I hate people like this…”

“Stop with all the honking! What are you, some kind of country bumpkin!?”

“This person clearly doesn’t care how stupid they look to those around them.”

Granted, the driver of the black kei car was wrong to pull out so suddenly and without bothering to signal, but is being cut off really cause for chasing someone down at high speed and potentially causing a far more serious accident? Relax, lady.

▼You pull out in front of me, I chase you down like a madman. Fair’s fair.

road rage chase

▼At 01:02, the angry driver gets level and edges left while leaning on her horn.

Road rage get level and honk

To the woman driving the camera-equipped car, this writer would like to be so bold as to convey a quick message: You’re cruising across the country at high speed in a seated position inside your big, comfortable car, slipping through toll gates that read your credit card on the fly and open automatically so that you don’t even have to stop and roll down a(n electric) window. Life’s pretty good. Take a nice deep breath and let it go.

Drive safely, boys and girls.

Source: ゴールドラッシュ

Video: YouTube