Searches for a premium car to hire and drive yourself in Tbilisi come up often enough to appear in Google’s own suggestions. The market that comes back is thinner than the search volume implies, and the reasons are structural rather than a matter of someone not having got round to it.
We have an obvious interest in the conclusion here, so the useful parts of this piece are the first two sections, which are about the market rather than about us.
What the self-drive market actually has
Plenty of good cars, very few flagship ones. Most of the Georgian rental fleet is compact SUVs and mid-range saloons, which is what the country’s roads and the bulk of demand call for. Move up a tier and you find executive saloons and large SUVs at a handful of agencies. Move up again, to a current flagship saloon, and the list is short enough to count.
Georgian airports handled 8.5 million passengers in 2025, 14 per cent more than the year before, and the rental fleets have scaled to meet that volume rather than its top half of one per cent. Supercars appear in search suggestions far more often than they appear on forecourts. Where something exotic is offered, ask how many of it the operator actually has; the deposit and the terms usually reflect the answer.
Why the insurance maths rarely works
This is the part that makes the whole category difficult, and it is worth understanding before spending an afternoon on enquiries.
The collision damage waiver on an ordinary hire car typically carries an excess in the hundreds of dollars already. On a vehicle worth six figures the deposit and excess scale with the car, and the exclusions do not soften. Tyres, glass, underbody and unsurfaced roads are the standard carve-outs, and those are precisely the damage Georgian mountain roads produce.
There is also a documents layer that catches people at the counter. A foreign licence is valid here for a year from the date you entered the country and an international permit is not legally required, but an agency renting out a flagship car may well insist on one as its own policy. That is why the rent-or-be-driven question resolves differently at this tier than it does for a compact SUV, where renting is frequently the right answer and we say so.
So the realistic offer is a very expensive car, a large card hold, an excess that would ruin the trip, and a contract that excludes the roads most visitors actually want to drive.
What exists instead
Much of the premium end of this market in Georgia is chauffeured rather than self-drive. That is not a local quirk; it is common wherever the cars are a small specialist fleet rather than a rental category.
Ours is four cars: a Maybach W223 saloon, a Maybach EQS 680, an S-Class and a seven-seat V-Class. Hourly hire runs 200 ₾ for the S-Class or V-Class and 300 ₾ for either Maybach on a three-hour minimum. A full day of eight to nine hours is 1 350 ₾ in the V-Class, 1 500 ₾ in the S-Class and 2 500 ₾ in either Maybach, and airport transfers are 350, 500 and 750 ₾ in the same order.
The comparison to make is not against a rental day rate. It is against a rental day rate plus the deposit sitting on your card for a fortnight, and then against what the excess would cost if a stone takes a wheel on the way to Kazbegi. On the chauffeured side, ask when you book what the fare includes.
When the chauffeured version is not the answer
A fortnight of unstructured driving on the main network. A guest who enjoys driving and is going to spend real time behind the wheel. A budget where the difference matters. In all three cases rent the good mid-range car and enjoy it, and spend the saving on the two or three days that need a driver.
We would rather write that sentence than take a booking that was reluctant. The same reasoning sits behind which days of an itinerary genuinely earn a day rate.
What people are usually actually asking for
Three different briefs sit under the same search.
A car for a photograph or an occasion. A wedding, a portrait, an arrival. This is a booking with a driver, not a rental: a short occasion runs on the hourly rate, and a wedding is priced on its own, agreed in writing beforehand.
A car for a guest who should not be seen getting out of something ordinary. This is an airport transfer and a week of hourly work, and what a VIP arrival at Tbilisi airport involves is set out separately.
A car because the trip is long and comfort compounds. This is a day rate, or a multi-day booking quoted as one engagement, and the honest advice is that the rear seat genuinely does something on a four-hour drive and nothing much on a twenty-minute one.
Some people asking this may not want to drive at all. They want the car to be there and not to be thinking about it, which is a different product with a different name.
A note on the two Maybachs
We run two, and they are not interchangeable in the way the shared name suggests. The W223 is the saloon. The EQS 680 is an electric SUV, with a higher seat and no engine note to talk over. The EQS 680 piece covers the difference properly.
They cost the same. The choice between them is about the road and the guest, not about price.
For a specific date and a specific car, write to booking@soitblack.com with the dates and what the car is for; every fare is confirmed in writing before the car is dispatched.