Challans
Who Pays the Traffic Challan on a Rental Car in Lahore?
An e-challan that arrives after your hire has ended, on a car that was never registered to you, driven by a man who works for someone else.
We do. On a chauffeur driven hire the person driving is our employee and the vehicle is registered to us, so a traffic challan is ours to pay and ours to deal with. You are not billed for it during the hire and you are not contacted about it afterwards. On a self drive hire anywhere in this market, the opposite is true, which is one more reason to know which product you have bought.
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The driver is ours, so the ticket is ours
A traffic challan is issued against a driver and a vehicle. On our hires both belong to us. The customer is a passenger, which is a legally and practically different thing from a hirer, and we do not pass a consequence of our employee's driving to the person sitting behind him.
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Why self drive changes this completely
On a self drive hire you are the driver. The vehicle is still registered to the rental company, so the challan still goes to them, but the liability is now yours and the company has your deposit. That combination is exactly where disputes come from, weeks after the car went back and long after anyone can reconstruct who was driving where.
It is also almost entirely unaddressed in published Lahore terms. Of the operators we read, the challan question appears once, in a list of charges a customer must cover, without saying how or when it would be collected. Nobody publishes how long after a hire they will pursue one, or what evidence a customer would be shown.
The question for a self drive operator
If a challan for my hire arrives six weeks from now, how will you tell me, what will you show me, and will you have already taken it from my deposit. If the answer to the last part is yes, that is the real deposit policy.
More on the difference between the two products is on the self drive page.
Questions
Asked before booking
Who pays a traffic fine on a rental car in Lahore?
With us, we do, because our employee was driving our vehicle. No Lahore operator we checked publishes a position on this at all, which means on most hires in this city the answer is decided after the ticket arrives.
What if the challan arrives after I have returned the car?
It arrives to us, because the vehicle is registered to us. You will not hear about it. An e-challan chasing a customer weeks after a hire is a self drive problem, not a chauffeur driven one.
What about motorway tolls?
On an out of city route fare the motorway toll is already inside the fare. Inside Lahore, parking and the Ring Road toll are added to your bill at cost. Neither is a fine and neither is a surprise.
What if I asked the driver to speed?
He will decline, and you should want him to. A driver who can be talked into an unsafe speed by a customer is a driver who can be talked into it by anyone.
Can I check a challan against a vehicle?
Punjab runs a public e-challan lookup for vehicle numbers. If you ever want to check a car we sent you, the registration is on the booking message we sent you before it arrived.
More on risk and liability