What the car costs, which car you need, and how to avoid the line that adds €430.

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The prices

• Small car from Puerto Montt: from CLP 20,000 per day (≈ €18)
• Car from Balmaceda: from CLP 560,000 per week (≈ €506)
• One-way drop fee: often around US$500 (≈ €430); no company publishes it, so get it in writing
• Insurance to take the car into Argentina: about CLP 80,000 (≈ €72) — request it at least 10 days before pickup, because the paperwork has to be prepared in advance

The one-way drop fee, explained

When you rent from Puerto Montt and hand the car back at Balmaceda (or the reverse), you're doing what's called a one-way rental — pickup and return points don't match. That's the exception, not the norm: rental fleets are sized to each location, and a car returned somewhere else has to get back to its home lot before the company can rent it out again. On most routes that's a short drive and a minor admin fee. Here it's a real cost: Puerto Montt and Balmaceda are roughly 1,240km apart on a mostly-gravel road with three ferry crossings, so repositioning that car is genuinely a multi-day job for the company, not an afternoon's drive.

That's what the drop fee is actually paying for — and it's why it's steep by rental-car standards: quotes run around US$500 (≈€430), on top of the daily rate, not instead of it. There's no published tariff, so it isn't calculated by a fixed formula you can check in advance; it's quoted case by case and varies by company, car class and which direction you're going (a company with too many cars sitting in one location may price the fee lower for drop-offs that help rebalance its fleet — worth asking about directly, since it isn't something they'll volunteer). Get the exact figure in writing before you book, not after.

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The way around it entirely is the loop: pick up and return at the same hub — Puerto Montt to Puerto Montt, or Balmaceda to Balmaceda — and the fee disappears, which is the single biggest lever on this page for controlling the car cost.

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Which car you need

No 4x4 for the main road. An ordinary car does it in summer. What matters more:

• Ground clearance — a small SUV rides the potholes and loose gravel better than a low hatchback
• A full-size, checked spare — punctures are the most common problem on the road
• Check what the rental cover excludes — windscreen, tyres and underbody damage on gravel are often not covered

How to drive it

• Gravel means 60km/h at best. Slow down for oncoming traffic; flying stones break windscreens.
• Don't drive after dark — no lighting, no barriers, and animals on the road.
• Fill up whenever you can: from Cochrane to Villa O'Higgins there's no fuel station for 244km.