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Tcab launches 24/7 car rental in Fukuoka and Okinawa with eight-language support and passport verification for 110 countries

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TANAAKK and TANAAKK EVGRID have launched Tcab in Fukuoka and Okinawa, a car-rental service for visitors to Japan supporting eight languages and passport verification for 110 countries and regions.

TANAAKK Inc. (headquarters: Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director and President: Masayoshi Aoki; hereinafter "TANAAKK") and mobility operator TANAAKK EVGRID Inc. (headquarters: Marunouchi, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo; Representative Director and President: Kensuke Suzuki; hereinafter "TANAAKK EVGRID") have launched "Tcab," an eight-language service for visitors to Japan that combines the convenience of car sharing and car rental, in the Fukuoka and Okinawa areas. Bookings can be made through the web/app "Tcab Explorer." On the first day of release, bookings arrived from the United Kingdom, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, confirming strong demand.

Tcab app

Market trends

According to visitor arrival statistics published by the Japan National Tourism Organization (JNTO), inbound visitors to Japan first exceeded the pre-COVID 2019 figure of 31.88 million in 2024, reaching a record high of about 36.87 million. In 2025 the figure rose further to about 42.68 million, up 15.75% year on year. Meanwhile, infrastructure such as lodging, transportation, and dining has lagged behind demand, which grew 33.87% over the six years from 2019 to 2025.

Business background

On regional itineraries, inbound travelers increasingly need to reach spots that are hard to access by public transport alone—aircraft, shinkansen, taxis, and buses. Conventional rental-counter pickup has faced hurdles including multilingual support, compliance with personal-data protection laws in each country, cybersecurity, business hours, full-tank returns, and labor shortages.

Tcab digitally supports passport verification for 110 countries and completes station selection, payment, and identity verification online. Because ordinary driving fuel is included in the base fare, a full-tank return is not required. Pickup location, return location, and return time can be changed at any time, and vehicles can be picked up and returned 24 hours a day. By providing urban infrastructure that lets people set out when the impulse strikes, Tcab is building a platform for exploring Japan more deeply and comfortably. (Patent pending)

Service overview

The Tcab™ Explorer concept

Tcab™ Explorer aims for an experience that strips away noise so it does not interrupt the special time of travel.

A hybrid car is both a means of mobility and a computational resource for exploring the planet. Through the app, users explore the places they visit, and those accumulations become a catalog of the Earth covering a region's flora and fauna, landscapes, architecture, food, and more.

Rental stations (Tspot)

There are the following types of Tspot:

Fukuoka (4 locations)

Okinawa (5 locations)

The difficulty of serving the whole world

What may look like a basic requirement is in fact rare in Japan: a car-rental service that can determine whether passports and driving credentials from some 200 countries worldwide are eligible, and, for 110 of those countries and regions, digitally complete eKYC to guarantee the authenticity of driver's licenses from Geneva Convention member states that permit driving in Japan. Publishing on the App Store and Google Play in each country requires compliance with each country's personal-data protection and tax laws, and opening a website to the world also means accepting the risk of DDoS attacks and unauthorized access. Even among major domestic sites, applications designed on the assumption of worldwide access remain limited.

Computational problems Tcab addresses

Tcab's operational optimization has a structure in which multiple NP-hard combinatorial problems hold at the same time.

These are formulated together as mixed-integer linear programming (MILP). After satisfying the constraints, Tcab realizes scale accompanied by ROIC and operating leverage.

Solving them separately does not produce a global optimum. Parking capacity sets the upper bound on the number of vehicles; the number of vehicles sets the required staff; staff shifts set the hours when handover is possible; and that whole determines utilization and revenue—an interdependent structure. When the objective function is placed on the spread between return on invested capital (ROIC) and WACC, invested capital also moves as the denominator at the same time, so the problem is not single-objective cost minimization but constrained multi-objective optimization.

Most car-rental businesses nationwide are franchise operations and are not vertically integrated, so these decision variables are scattered across separate companies and systems and cannot be solved as one. The same reason explains why, in ordinary one-way rentals, inter-company purchases occur behind the scenes.

The TANAAKK Group vertically integrates booking, payment, identity verification, inventory exclusive control, and on-demand dispatch with parking, vehicles, and staff, and computes and controls them as a single decision problem. Treating vehicles as urban computational resources, it will design dual use in both ordinary times and emergencies.

Operating companies

TANAAKK Inc.

TANAAKK, a digitally vertically integrated company that provides the GAAS software platform, supplies intellectual property, software, algorithms, and databases for Tcab. It is responsible for trademarks and patents, payments, eKYC, the booking system, the inventory exclusive-control system, and the on-demand dispatch system. It has obtained ISO 9001 and ISO 27001, and also provides vulnerability assessment services based on information-security service criteria.

TANAAKK EVGRID Inc.

Holds a secondhand-dealer license and a permit for the paid lending of privately owned automobiles. It handles parking, vehicle ownership, and dispatch-staff shift management, and operates Fukuoka and Okinawa branches.

Through this division of roles within the group, IT infrastructure (booking, payment, identity verification, inventory, and dispatch) and on-the-ground vehicle, parking, and staffing operations are provided as one.

Intended use cases

Vision: toward a future where you can leave now

If a future in which people can move when they want to move is realized, they will act more intuitively and more readily discover latent desires they had not been conscious of. Those discoveries chain one after another, and previously unseen points of desire connect toward the future as if drawing in a spider's thread. That network of chain reactions then accelerates the evolution of new lifestyles and values. Technology that looks toward the future holds the potential not only to transform the mobility industry, but to change how people live.

Company profiles

TANAAKK Inc.

TANAAKK EVGRID Inc.

Media inquiries

TANAAKK Inc. / TANAAKK EVGRID Inc., Public Relations: Mukai
E-mail: info@tanaakk.com
Tel: +81-3-6257-5600

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