Automatic Car Hire in Tivat: 394 of 500 Cars
Here the automatic is the default rather than the upgrade: 394 cars of 500.
Same as pickup
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The manual is the minority here
Across most of southern Europe the automatic is the scarce option and priced accordingly. On this coast the split runs 394 to 106 the other way, and a driver who assumes they will pay extra for two pedals is working from the wrong map.
The reason is the road, not the market. Everything worth driving to from here involves gradient: the shore road to Kotor climbs and drops through every village, the ridge to Budva is a sustained pull, and the serpentine above Kotor is twenty-five hairpins of first and second gear. Operators buy what their customers can actually drive on that, and the fleet has tilted accordingly over the last decade.
So the practical advice is inverted from the usual. Filter for automatic first and you still have almost the entire list; filter for manual and you are choosing from a fifth of it. If you specifically want to shift gears on these roads, that is the booking to make early.
79%
of the fleet is automatic
- Automatics listed
- 394
- Cheapest automatic
- 29 EUR a day
- Cheapest manual
- 28 EUR a day
- The whole premium
- 1 EUR a day
Where the gearbox actually changes the day
The serpentine above Kotor
Twenty-five numbered hairpins, most of them blind, several of them single track with a wall on one side and nothing on the other. In a manual it is constant clutch work. In an automatic you get to look at the bay.
The coast road in August
Twenty kilometres of stop, roll, stop between here and Kotor at the height of the season. This is where an automatic stops being a preference and becomes the difference between arriving relaxed and arriving irritated.
The ferry ramp
A short steep incline onto a moving deck with a queue behind you. Entirely manageable either way, and noticeably less interesting in an automatic on a hill start.
The road to Budva
The one place it barely matters. Over the ridge and down, a steady climb and a steady descent, third gear most of the way in anything.
Coming down is the part to think about
Getting up the serpentine is a question of patience. Coming back down is a question of brakes, and it is where drivers who have only ever used automatics occasionally get into trouble. Riding the pedal for four kilometres of continuous descent overheats it, and the first sign is the pedal going long exactly when you would rather it did not.
The answer is the same as in a manual: let the engine hold the car. Nearly every automatic in this fleet has either a manual gate on the lever or paddles behind the wheel, and dropping a gear before you start down does the whole job. Find that control in the car park at the top, with the handbrake on and no queue behind you, rather than halfway down.
It takes about ten seconds and it is the single most useful thing on this page for anyone driving to Lovcen. The page on that road covers the rest of it.
Gearbox questions
Less urgently than almost anywhere else on this network, because 394 of the 500 cars are automatic. What does need booking early here is the cheap end of any class, and in July and August that pressure applies to automatics and manuals alike.
One euro a day at the entry point: 29 EUR against 28 EUR. Higher up the list the two are interleaved rather than tiered. If a specific listing looks expensive, that is the car, not the gearbox.
Yes, because you are booking a specific car from a named operator rather than a vehicle class. That is a real difference from booking a category with an international brand, where the gearbox is part of a promise rather than part of the listing.
Not in a modern car, and the driving here favours it. Constant gradient and heavy summer traffic are exactly the conditions where an older automatic lost out and a current one with more ratios does not.
If your week is Budva and the beaches, comfortably yes. If it includes the serpentine, Lovcen or the Durmitor road, spend the euro. It is not about capability, it is about how much of the drive you get to spend looking at the view.
Filtered to automatics already
The list above shows only the 394. Add your dates to see which of them are free.
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