I wanted to make a quick guide for people here for interwar and World War II Japanese armored cars, because most internet sites, especially wikipedia, get them horribly wrong, treating different types as if they're the same, using the wrong names, and even making up fake vehicles entirely.

First thing is to clarify the manufacturers. Ishikawajima was an industrial company that manufactured some early Japanese military vehicles. From 1927 onward they used the marque Sumida for their cars and trucks.

TGE (Tokyo Gas-Electric) was a truck manufacturer. From 1931 onward they used the marque Chiyoda.

These names were leant to certain armored cars, because the armored cars were built on truck chassis from those marques.

In 1937, Ishikawajima, TGE, and DAF (another truck manufacturer) all merged to form Tokyo Jidōsha Kōgyō. This is the same company we now know as Isuzu. Jidōsha Kōgyō changed their name to Diesel Jidōsha in 1941, and changed it again in 1947 to Isuzu.

There were many experimental and improvised armored cars, but the first production model was the Type 90, named after the Japanese imperial year 2590 (1930), the year it was introduced. This is how all standardized Japanese Army equipment was named. The Type 90 is usually nicknamed Sumida Model P, because it used the chassis from the Sumida Type P truck. It saw action with the SNLF in Shanghai. Recognizable features are the barrel-shaped turret and the flat sides with a "kink" in them.



Type 90 Armored Car

Sumida Type P truck

The next model is the Type 91 So-Mo, often incorrectly called Type 93 / Type 2593. This was based on the chassis of the Chiyoda Model Q; the model code for the armored car specifically was Chiyoda Model QSW. This design was similar to the Type 90, but it was meant to also run on rails, so it had brackets on the side of the body to hold the tires/railroad wheels when the other wheels were in use. The wheel brackets are the main way to differentiate the two. The So-Mo is also more common, and it lacks rear side skirts, which the Type 90 had.



Type 91 So-Mo

The Type 92 armored car is nicknamed Chiyoda, and it was also based on the Chiyoda Model Q. The Type 92 was only meant to run on roads, it didn't have the convertible feature the So-Mo did. Recognizable features are the cylindrical turret with two slices taken out of the top, flat sides with no "kink" in them, and the upside-down U-shaped rear fenders.



Type 92 Chiyoda

The last production Japanese armored car used in World War II was the Type 93, nicknamed Kokusan. It was built by Ishikawajima, but I don't know on what chassis. Like the Type 90, it was used by the Japanese Navy. Recognizable features are the roller wheel behind the front steering wheels, and the angular cut out in the fender that surrounds the roller, and the turret with a sloped-back front plate.



Type 93 Kokusan

The Japanese also imported a large number of Vickers-Crossley Armoured Cars and designated them Type 87. The Vickers-Crossley is very distinctive on account of its hemispherical turret with four machine guns.



Type 87 Vickers-Crossley

Some armored cars which are NOT Japanese, but were reported as being in old books, on wikipedia, and so on.

The so-called "Type 92 Osaka" is in fact a Chinese armored car built by Shanghai Arsenal. Only four of this design were built. At least one was captured by the Japanese and paraded around as a captured trophy, but it was not used operationally.




This design was described as being a "Dowa" armored car (that name is applied to many Japanese armored cars, usually wrongly) but it is in fact an improvised vehicle built by the French police in Shanghai. It was captured by the Japanese but was never seen again.



It is very unlikely for either of these two to ever show up in a piece of media.