Car Rental

Most Swiss desks rent from age 20, but drivers under 25 pay a young-driver surcharge that commonly adds CHF 15 to 25 a day, and a few premium categories are closed to them entirely.

The main driver needs a licence held for at least a year, a passport or ID card, and a credit card in their own name. Debit cards are often refused for the deposit, which is blocked rather than charged and runs from roughly CHF 1,000 to 2,500 depending on the category.

An EU or EFTA licence is enough on its own. A licence from outside that, or one not written in the Latin alphabet, should be paired with an International Driving Permit — obtain it in your home country before travelling, because it cannot be issued in Switzerland.

Switzerland charges a flat CHF 40 a year for motorway use. There are no toll booths and no per-journey charge: you either hold a vignette or you do not. It covers the calendar year with a grace period either side, and an electronic version tied to the number plate has existed since 2023.

Every car rented inside Switzerland comes with one already on the windscreen. Check it before you leave the lot, particularly in January when the year turns over.

Driving on a motorway without one is a CHF 200 fine plus the price of the vignette, collected on the spot. If you rent abroad and drive in, you buy your own at the border, a post office, a petrol station or online.

Switzerland has no blanket law requiring winter tyres. What it has is liability: if you block traffic or cause a collision on unsuitable tyres, you are fined and your insurance payout can be cut.

Rental cars are generally fitted with winter tyres from around October until Easter, but treat that as something to confirm rather than assume — especially with smaller suppliers and with cars picked up across the border.

Snow chains are compulsory only where a sign says so, on specific passes and access roads. Rentals rarely include them, so ask when you book a winter trip into the mountains. Several alpine passes close for the season; the car-carrying trains through the Furka, Oberalp and Lötschberg tunnels take vehicles when the pass above is shut.

Swiss rentals include third-party liability by law, plus a collision damage waiver. The waiver is not insurance: it is a cap on what you can be charged. The amount below that cap is the excess, commonly CHF 1,000 to 2,500, and it is yours to pay.

The desk will offer to reduce the excess to zero for a daily fee. Across a week that fee often approaches the excess it removes, which is why it is the most profitable thing sold at the counter.

Many credit cards include rental cover that reimburses the excess, usually on condition that the whole rental is paid with that card and the desk's own waiver is declined. Read your card's terms before you decline anything, because the two conditions are easy to break by accident.

Switzerland is small and surrounded, so a car picked up in Zurich or Geneva reaches Germany, France, Italy, Austria or Liechtenstein within a couple of hours. Most suppliers allow it, but it has to be declared: an undeclared crossing can void the cover entirely.

A cross-border fee is normal, and some categories are excluded outright — usually the more expensive ones. Neighbouring countries also charge for their own roads: Austria and Slovenia use vignettes, Italy and France use toll booths, Germany does not charge private cars.

Milan, Turin and many other Italian cities enforce restricted traffic zones by camera. Fines arrive months later, and the rental company adds an administration charge for passing your details to the authority.

The limits are 50 km/h in built-up areas, 80 outside them, 100 on expressways and 120 on motorways, with 30 zones increasingly common on residential streets. Signs override all of it.

Enforcement is heavy and largely automatic. Serious speeding is scaled to the driver's income rather than charged from a fixed table, which is why Switzerland produces the fines that make international news.

The alcohol limit is 0.5 grams per litre, and 0.1 for new and professional drivers. Dipped headlights are mandatory day and night, all year round. Fines follow the rental company, which passes them on with an administration fee, weeks or months after the trip.

White bays are paid, by meter or app, with the ticket displayed on the dashboard. Blue bays are free for a limited time — usually one hour — but only with a parking disc set to your arrival time.

The disc is a small cardboard clock. Rentals often have one in the glovebox; if not, petrol stations, police stations and many kiosks give them out. Parking in a blue bay without one is treated exactly like parking without a ticket.

Yellow markings and yellow crosses are private or reserved. Cars left there are towed rather than ticketed, and recovery is expensive. City centres are made deliberately awkward for cars, so park-and-ride at the edge with a train into the middle is usually both faster and far cheaper than a central garage.