We departed SFO on Nov 23rd, 2024 by Eva BR017. It was a late night flight. We rented a Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV to go to the airport. It has been more than 10 years since I have driven a Mitsubishi I think. I don't think I have seen this model on the street much. This particular one has a Ralliart trim and it looked pretty nice outside. But internal wise I don't think it's too exciting, The Hybrid system looks similar to the Nissan we were going to drive when we arrived in Japan.
We have premium economy seats during our SFO - TPE leg. Since it was late at night and I haven't had enough sleep for many days in a row, I was able to get a good sleep after finishing dinner. Service and food were good as usual.
We had a transit at TPE and we were able to get a shower at the EVA business class lounge since our next leg to FUK was in business class. It was nice to get a shower because we were going to have a full day after arriving in Japan.
We had many things planned upon arriving at Fukuoka, However the line at the immigration was very long and it took us more than an hour before we were able to walk out past custom. Then we went down to the first floor, and walked towards to left side where we called the Nissan rental company to come and pick us up. We had to walk back up to the arrival floor and to the right to wait for the shuttle. It took a while before they came but we were the only customer. It seems Nissan wasn't as popular as Toyota, Nippon or Budget. The lady drive did not talk much to us at all and took us to a small office on the other side of the airport. I believe it is closer to the domestic terminal. At the office, there were only two employees, the lady driver and another guy. The guy speaks good English so I did not have to use any Japanese. I believe the car we got was a Nissan X-Trail E-power. It is a kind of Hybrid and the interface looks very similar to the Mitsubishi we rented at SJC. However, I don't think it can be charged. The car was not as clean as it should be, or compare to the Corolla we rented in Hokkaido earlier in the year. However, I liked the car right away, mostly because it support Android Auto and Apple Car Play. If I remember correctly I used Android Auto for most of my trip with my Pixel 9 Pro since I was going to use Google map anyway, and I could leave the phone plugged in to get it charged too. I believe the car did support wireless Car Play, and maybe wireless Android Auto too.
Driving in the city did took me some time to get use to. Driving on the different side of the street is one thing, but more than that the traffic lights situation. I remember running into another situation at Nagasaki and also when returning the car at downtown Fukuoka which I hope to write about later.
So once we got the car, we slowly make our way on to the highway toward our first destination. It is already about 2 hours later than what I hoped it would be.