Car Rental in Japan
 

We will be renting a car at Noto airport and staying overnight on the peninsula. The next day we will drive to Kanazawa. I made a tentative reservation through ToCoo for the Nissan outlet at the airport. I requested non-smoking P-2 class (we will have very little luggage) with English GPS. When I received the confirmation, it says that they can not guarantee any of this "due to class specification reservation". What does this mean? I would feel a lot more comfortable with this reservation knowing I have the English GPS when driving to Kanazawa.

I could also make a reservation with Nissan directly. Is there any advantage to doing this? Also, should I pick a more expensive (larger) car class in order to assure having GPS?

I would generally want to know how you do make language changes on GPS's

I would not expect to get GPS in English in Noto to be honest, but it isn't hard to use in Japanese by inputting telephone numbers. Many systems (my own included) have the option for English voice but input and display is all Japanese. I see on Nissan's site that they offer GPS with basic menu in English but map display in Japanese and English sound in some cases but can not guarantee it. it is likely offered in locations where there is enough demand.

Do you want us to call the Noto companies and see if any of them have English GPS on Tuesday (Monday is a holiday)?

Hi Kim. Are there more than one? Would be great just to know. I am sure we could get by with Japanese GPS and phone numbers. Noto is easy to navigate - just concerned about getting to Kanazawa...

Nissan and Toyota at least, maybe more. I'm always lost so not a good barometer of how easy it is to get to Kanazawa from Flatt's - I got lost both on the way to Flatt's and going home, with navigation, with 3 of us in the car, 2 Japanese women and me. Have to laugh at how we are lost even with navigation.

a good map might help---they worked well for centuries

In Hokkaido we combined a GPS with the basic menu in English (as Kim describes) with a paper map in English. It was easy to see the correspondence between the locations in Japanese and in English. Just make sure you get the car rental place to show you how to get the English menu--that wasn't very clear, but they worked it out for us.

If I remember correctly, the JR rental we got at Hakata, which was booked via ToCoo with "English" GPS simply means JR's staff would switch the menu language to English in advance, and also gave us a printout in English of the user manual.

The street names showing on the GPS are still in Japanese.