Renting a car in China

This post is a brief experience report of obtaining a temporary Chinese driver’s license in Shenzhen and subsequently renting a car through 一嗨. Hopefully this can be of help to others that want to do the same. Realistically it requires good conversational Mandarin and a Chinese contact that can help with payment (or a Chinese bank account).

Payment methods #

Nowadays one uses Alipay or Wechat to pay for things in China, often cash is not even an option. One can conveniently set up Alipay with an international credit card and mostly get along with that, but in some cases the Alipay - credit card payment option does not work. We did not use Wechat, so I can’t tell whether it works the same with that or not.

Some places, for example 一嗨, do not accept the Alipay - credit card payment, but require either

• using Alipay with a connected Chinese bank account
• or using Alipay balance (余款)

Now this is where you’ll need a Chinese contact to help you with either of those. The route we went with was to have someone transfer money from their account to ours, resulting in us having usable 余款 on our account. From now on I’ll refer to the two payment options as

• Alipay (when using credit card)
• Alipay balance

Getting a temporary driver’s license #

China does not recognize any of the two international driver’s licenses. So one has to either get a proper permanent Chinese license (which requires exams) or opt for the temporary license (临时机动车驾驶许可, valid for 3 months). In the following I describe the process of obtaining the temporary license.

Required documents #

These documents are needed:

• original driver’s license
• passport
• recognized Chinese translation of the driver’s license
• biometric picture

The Chinese translation of the driver’s license can easily be obtained through 淘宝, there are plenty of translation services that produce a recognized translation document for around 100RMB. Searching for “翻译国外驾照” should yield many results, just pick one with good reviews. International credit cards can be used for payment, but the translation documents need to be shipped to a Chinese address. Here is where a Chinese contact that can receive the translation would come in handy, but I guess one could also arrange for a hotel to receive the documents previous to one’s stay there.

The biometric picture can be obtained directly at the same place where the application process takes place, more on that in the following section.

The process #

In Shenzhen the documents have to be handed in at the 深圳南山区车管所办证大厅, that’s the only place that can issue a temporary license. You need to make an appointment online in advance if you don’t want to rely on begging for one in person like us (we were lucky). See the image for the detailed instructions, best to make the appointment as much in advance as possible, when we checked for available slots, the next 10 days were fully booked.

On the day of the appointment these steps need to be taken:

• taking biometric picture at lower floor of the building in the automatic photo booths (20RMB, pay with Alipay)
• watching 30 minutes of videos of bad accidents
  • first ask for a card that notes the starting time
  • watch 30 minutes
  • get the card stamped after 30 minutes and bring it along to application window
• using all documents to get the temporary driver’s license at one of the application windows (10RMB, pay with Alipay balance or cash)
  • this requires drawing a number and waiting for a long time, 2 hours in our case, so you should actually draw this number before doing any of the other steps

If all goes well, you should now have your temporary driver’s license like the one below, congratulations!

Renting a car with 一嗨 #

We opted for 一嗨 because it’s one of the biggest platforms (the other one being 神州租车) and one can bring back the car at a different location than where it got picked up (异地还车).

Account setup #

Before one is able to actually rent a car with them, they have to verify your identification document and driver’s license. For us it turned out to be a big hassle to find an 一嗨 location that was actually able to verify our temporary license, presumably they don’t often deal with those. I believe it also depends on the willingness of the personnel. I suggest to reserve a day or so before actually renting the car to find a bigger store that is able to do this, use the 一嗨 app to find the stores and their numbers and call them beforehand.

Booking a car #

The booking process is quite straightforward, payment is only required on the day of pick-up. A 2000RMB deposit is required. Both the rental fee and the deposit have to be paid with Alipay balance.

Conclusion #

Renting a car in China is doable as a foreign tourist, but requires quite some work. You probably only want to go through this pain if you’re going to do a bigger trip of at least 2 weeks. If you know that you’ll want to rent a car more often in the future, it may be worth to go for the permanent license.