What a car buys, and what it costs you
A rental car buys you the things public transport cannot: a fortress above a reservoir at eight in the morning, a Kakhetian cellar four kilometres off the bus route, a ridge road with nobody on it. The country is small — Tbilisi to Batumi is around 370 kilometres — and the good parts are usually the detours nobody schedules a minibus for.
What it costs is attention. Georgian roads mix new motorway with village lanes where a cow holds the centre line by custom if not by law, and the overtaking is committed rather than tentative. Nothing here is dangerous in the way people mean when they say dangerous. It simply asks you to drive as though everyone around you is about to do something.
The honest summary is that a car is superb for Kakheti, Kazbegi, Racha and the long transits, mediocre in Batumi, and an outright liability in central Tbilisi. Plenty of good trips rent for three days in the middle of the itinerary and use marshrutkas, trains and taxis at either end.
Licence, age, deposit: the boring part
Most visitors drive on their home licence. Georgia accepts valid foreign licences from a long list of countries for a normal tourist stay, and an International Driving Permit costs little and ends the argument at the desk if your licence is not in Latin script. Rental companies then set their own rules on top of the law, and theirs are stricter.
Expect to be twenty-one or older, to have held the licence for a year or two, and to leave a deposit blocked on a credit card — often somewhere between 300 and 1,500 GEL (2025) depending on the car. Debit cards are refused more often than not. Photograph the car from every angle before you drive off, roof and windscreen included.
What the insurance actually excludes
Basic third-party cover comes with the car. Everything above that is a menu: a collision waiver that still leaves you liable for an excess of several hundred lari, a zero-excess upgrade, and a set of exclusions that almost always includes tyres, glass, the underbody and the wheels — precisely the parts a Georgian gravel road goes for first.
The two clauses that matter are unpaved roads and named roads. Some contracts void the whole policy the moment you leave asphalt, and nearly all of them exclude the road to Tusheti over the Abano Pass, which is also the road most people fantasise about driving. If you want Tusheti, hire a local driver and let the insurance be his problem.
Overtaking, and the right-hand-drive problem
The local overtaking style is decisive and begins earlier than you would begin it. Drivers pull out on solid lines, on bends, and on the working assumption that the oncoming car will move right and make a third lane out of the hard shoulder. It generally works. The practical response is to keep right and leave that space rather than defend your half of the road.
Georgia also runs a large number of imported right-hand-drive cars, mostly from Japan, on roads built for left-hand drive. A driver sitting on the wrong side cannot see past the lorry in front, so he noses out to look and then commits. If a car edges across the centre line towards you, it is usually looking rather than attacking: slow, hold your line, flash your lights.
Cows, sheep and the dark
Livestock is not an anecdote here, it is a road condition. Cows stand on the centre line of a main road with complete confidence, pigs cross in Kakheti without looking, and in spring and autumn flocks of sheep fill an entire carriageway as they move between pastures. None of them will move for a horn, and none of them is insured.
The rule is to slow to a crawl and pass behind the animal rather than in front of it, and never to assume that one cow is one cow. In the mountains add the flock dogs, which run at cars and expect you to brake. Hitting livestock is a civil matter you will settle in cash, at the roadside, with an unhappy owner.
Gravel, fords and mountain gradients
The main roads are better than their reputation. Tbilisi to Batumi is mostly motorway now, with the Rikoti section a long-running construction project that can swallow an hour without warning; the Georgian Military Road to Kazbegi is paved the whole way, though the Jvari Pass shuts for snow; the road up to Mestia is paved and genuinely beautiful. Trouble starts on the branches.
Beyond Mestia, deep into Racha, or up to Omalo, the surface turns to loose gravel with drop-offs and no barrier, and after rain the fords rise fast. A small hatchback will crawl along a dry gravel road; it will not manage a wet one, and your contract may not allow it to try. Where the answer is a 4x4, the better answer is usually a local driver.
Fuel, tolls and what a driving day costs
Fuel is sold by attendants: you say an amount in lari or ask for full, they pump, you pay inside. Petrol sits somewhere around 2.5–3.5 GEL a litre (2025) and moves with the exchange rate and the grade you choose. The big chains on the main roads take cards; the single pump in a mountain village may not, so carry some cash.
There are no motorway tolls in Georgia, so the cost of a driving day is fuel, parking and the occasional camera fine. A small rental runs roughly 80–200 GEL a day (2025) and a 4x4 more like 200–400 GEL, both markedly cheaper per day over a week. Budget real distances: Tbilisi to Batumi is around 370 kilometres and five to six hours if Rikoti behaves.
Police, cameras and the dashcam habit
The Patrol Police are visible, professional and nothing like the shakedown operation described in older guidebooks; the reform of the traffic police is one of the things Georgians are genuinely proud of. A stop is usually your documents, a glance over the car and thirty seconds of conversation. Nobody will ask you for cash, and you should not offer any.
Enforcement is mostly automatic. Speed cameras line the main highways, the fine reaches the rental company weeks later and lands on your card with an administration fee. Limits are 60 in built-up areas, 90 outside them and 110 on the motorway, seatbelts are compulsory front and back, and the drink-drive limit is low enough to treat as zero.
Why you should not have a car in Tbilisi
Central Tbilisi is where a rental stops being an asset and becomes a chore. Traffic is dense and improvisational, lane markings are treated as advice, the Old Town streets were laid out for carts, and parking is a paid, zoned and closely patrolled business that your guesthouse may or may not be able to solve on your behalf.
The city also does not need one. The metro is quick and costs about a lari a ride (2025), taxis ordered through an app cross the centre for a few lari more, and the good parts of the centre are walkable anyway. Collect the car on the morning you leave town and hand it back the day you come back.
Five mistakes, so you skip them
Four of these are ours. The first one costs money, the last one costs an evening, and all five are avoidable before you turn the key.