Checklist: what to check when you pick up a rental car in Georgia

Allow 15 minutes for collecting the car, and they will be the best-value fifteen minutes of the whole trip. There are six blocks to work through: the documents in the car, the key clauses of the contract (the excess, the deposit, the fuel policy), the bodywork and glass, the tyres and the spare, the fuel level, and whether everything inside actually works. Anything that raises a doubt, film it before you drive out of the car park.

Documents: what should be in the car and on you

There will be fewer bits of paper in the glovebox than you're used to. Insurance in Georgia is electronic and sits in a database, so there's no separate policy to carry around. The rental agreement is often signed electronically too.

What you should end up with after handover:

• The registration certificate in the car, usually a copy, and that's normal: plenty of owners keep the original on them.
• A rental agreement in your name, on paper or electronic. You don't need a separate power of attorney for a rental car — the agreement itself is what confirms your right to drive it.
• A copy of the agreement on your phone. Download the file rather than leaving a link: on the approach to Stepantsminda or in Svaneti the signal disappears, and you may need the document at a check.
• A support contact that answers outside office hours as well. Save the number straight away, not at the moment you need it.

Keep your passport, your driving licence and the card the deposit was held on with you. National licences are accepted in Georgia and an international permit is usually not asked for. The exception: if your licence carries no Latin transliteration of your name, it's better to have an IDP, because the questions come up not at the rental desk but out on the road at a police check.

The contract: the clauses people usually read last

The contract gets signed on the bonnet in two minutes, and then people work out what's actually in it later, at drop-off. Before you sign, find six lines with your eyes:

• The excess. The sum you pay yourself if the car is damaged. In Georgia it's most often $300–1,000, depending on the class of car. Full cover with no excess costs roughly $8–15 a day.
• What the basic insurance doesn't cover. Usually the glass, tyres, wheels, mirrors and underbody. Which is to say precisely what suffers on gravel and in the mountains.
• The deposit. The amount, the form (a hold on a card or cash) and when it comes back. The money is often held for another 2–4 weeks after you return the car: cameras register fines with a delay, and they land on the car's owner. There's more in the piece on the car rental deposit in Georgia.
• The mileage limit. Plenty of tariffs are unlimited, but not all of them. Tbilisi, Svaneti and back comfortably comes to 1,500 km in a week.
• The fuel policy. The standard is a full tank at pickup, full again at return.
• Prohibited destinations. Tusheti, the road above Mestia to Ushguli, Vashlovani, Juta, the Goderdzi Pass. This isn't advice about ground clearance, it's a term of the contract: drive in there and the insurance stops working whatever car you're in.

Two more things to ask about separately: whether a second driver is named on the agreement, and whether leaving the country is allowed. You cannot drive into Armenia on Georgian plates without written permission from the rental company, and at the border that gets established fast.

Some of these questions are settled before you even reach the car park: on MY.DRIVE the excess, the deposit and the final price are visible at the booking stage, so at handover all that's left is to check the contract against what you chose, rather than learning the terms for the first time.

Bodywork, glass and wheels: how to film it properly

Walk right round the car and film a video. Slowly, two or three minutes, saying it out loud as you go: "right front wing, dent". The sound on the recording helps just as much as the picture later on.

At first I used to film the car right there in the airport's underground car park, and then at home I couldn't tell a scratch from the glare of a strip light on the footage. Now I ask for the car to be rolled out into daylight, even if that costs an extra five minutes.

What to look at closely:

• The bumpers from underneath, and the sills. That's where everything you catch on kerbs and speed bumps collects.
• All four wheels, the right-hand ones especially.
• The windscreen: a chip the size of a pea turns into a crack after a week on the road to Kazbegi, and glass is almost never part of the basic insurance.
• The mirrors, the roof (hail happens in Kakheti), the tailgate.
• The interior: stains, burnt upholstery, the state of the mats.

Every bit of damage you find has to go into the condition report. Photograph the signed report in full, marks included. If the manager says "oh, that's nothing, we won't write it down", write it down anyway. And if you do end up in an accident during the trip, the report plus your photos from handover make the conversation far easier.

Tyres and the spare: what to look at before the mountains

Check the tread depth and the sidewalls: cuts and bulges appear quickly on Georgian gravel. In winter, check separately that the car isn't on summer tyres: on the climb to Gudauri they're useless, and sometimes you simply won't be let onto the pass with them. Before a mountain route the general mountain trip checklist is worth a look too.

Then open the boot and lift the floor. There should be a spare (or a repair kit), a jack and a wheel brace. Once, near Gori, I picked up a screw in a tyre and discovered a tidy space-saver inflated to half pressure, with no brace anywhere. I spent two hours on the verge waiting for help. Ever since, checking the boot takes me thirty seconds and always gets done.

If the wheels have locking bolts, ask to be shown where the key socket for them lives.

Cabin and instruments: five minutes of checks

Get behind the wheel and work through the list:

• Air conditioning on cold and the heater on hot. In July it's +38 in Tbilisi, and in September at Abano it's around zero at night; both need to work.
• The wipers and the washer fluid level. In summer on the Tbilisi–Batumi road the windscreen is covered in insects within an hour.
• Lights: dipped beam, main beam, indicators, brake lights. Ask someone to watch the brake lights from outside while you press the pedal.
• Seatbelts in every seat, the child seat mounts, and the seat itself.
• A phone holder and a charger. Navigation runs almost non-stop on a trip round Georgia, and the phone is flat by lunchtime.
• The instrument panel once the engine is running: engine check, tyre pressure symbol, oil light. No warning light should stay lit after start-up.

Check the odometer reading and the fuel left against what's written in the contract. Photograph the numbers on the odometer.

Fuel and LPG

Ask what fuel the car takes and look at the sticker on the filler flap. At petrol stations in Georgia the standard offering is 92, 95, 98 and diesel; each chain has its own brand names for them, so it's simpler to ask by number.

Some of the cheaper cars run on LPG. The cylinder in the boot eats half the usable space, and gas stations high in the mountains turn up noticeably less often than down in the valley. If the car has an LPG system, ask to be shown how to switch over, and check whether the gas is full at handover.

Hybrids are a story of their own. Georgian rental fleets have plenty of them, and an older-generation Prius doesn't start the way a familiar saloon does. Get to grips with the start button and the selector in the car park, not as you pull out into the traffic on Tsereteli. If you're still choosing a class of car for your route, which car to take and jeep or sedan are covered separately.

Three hundred metres before you leave

Before you drive off, do a lap of the car park. Hit the brakes hard on an empty stretch: the pedal shouldn't sink and the car shouldn't pull to one side. Listen to the suspension over a bump. Check the handbrake, reverse, the camera and the parking sensors, if it has them.

Anything odd at this stage is solved by a five-minute conversation. The same oddity forty kilometres later is solved by a tow truck.

The short version

Collection comes down to three actions: film the car in daylight, get every bit of damage into the condition report, and read the lines in the contract about the excess, the deposit and the prohibited roads. Add the boot check, with the spare and the jack, to that list as a separate item, because that's the one people skip most often. Keep all the photos and documents in a single folder on your phone until the deposit is back on your card.