What You Are Legally Required to Carry in the Car: Alps, Country by Country

Pack a triangle, a vest for everyone in the car, and a first aid kit. That covers the carry rules in France, Austria, Switzerland, Germany and Italy, and in Switzerland it over-packs, which costs you almost nothing.

You almost certainly do not need a breathalyser. France is the only country here we looked at for this, because France is where the myth lives, and the requirement was reported dead years ago, on a source we could not corroborate against the government's own pages. It is the most repeated piece of out-of-date advice about driving in France.

Switzerland does not require a hi-vis vest at all. Only a warning triangle, which must be easily reachable in the car. Pack vests anyway if any leg of your trip crosses a border, which on a Geneva arrival can be inside the first hour.

Snow chains and winter tyres are a different kind of question, and the one worth reading properly. Austria and Germany both write theirs as conditional on the actual state of the road rather than on the date. France's is a date plus a map. Italy does not write one nationally at all.

This is information, not legal advice.

Nearly every commercial page about driving in the Alps quotes a flat 135 euro fine for the French snow chain rule, and almost none of them mentions that the fine has never actually been enforced. That is the one number on this subject we could check against a government source, and the pages that publish it without naming a statute are all wrong in the same direction at once.

So we tried to read the laws themselves. Some of it worked. France's service-public.gouv.fr gave us the triangle and vest requirement and the penalties in the government's own wording. The Sénat published a written answer in February 2026 that settles the snow chain fine question outright. Germany's federal legal portal, gesetze-im-internet.de, gave us paragraph 53a of the StVZO verbatim.

Three did not work. Austria's official RIS database returned 503 errors on both attempts, so the Austrian statute text here comes from Jusline, a legal-text mirror rather than the government's own site. Switzerland's fedlex.admin.ch served a JavaScript shell with no readable text, so the Swiss traffic ordinance article here also comes from a mirror. Italy's normattiva.it could not be fetched this pass, so the Codice della Strada article here comes from Brocardi, a well-regarded legal database that is not the government.

Mirrors are usually right. They are also not the thing itself. The fine amounts for Austria and Germany come from motoring clubs and fine-lookup sites rather than official schedules, and the Italian regional figures come from regional press. Those are the softest numbers on this page. We would rather tell you which is which than average them all into one confident voice.

France is the country we can be most precise about, because service-public.gouv.fr publishes both the requirement and the penalty in one place.

The vest must carry CE marking and be stored à portée de main, within reach. The triangle must be an approved type and be in the car. Failing to produce them on request is a fine of up to 38 euros. That is the roadside-check penalty, and it is trivial.

The expensive one is a different offence. Failing to wear the vest and failing to signal your immobilised car when it is a danger to traffic carries a fine of up to 750 euros. Our research notes that the sum usually issued is a fixed 135 euro forfait, which is a note about practice rather than something the government page states in the words we read. Either way the shape of it is clear: France barely fines you for not owning a vest. It fines you for standing on a French carriageway at dusk without one on.

That is also why within reach matters more than it sounds. A vest in the boot is a vest you have to get out of the car to fetch, and getting out of the car is the exact moment it exists to protect. Be careful with how far you push that, though: the French text says within reach, it does not spell out reachable from the driver's seat. The seat version is our reading, not the law's words. Austria's paragraph 102, as we read it in the mirror, is the same: it requires the vest to be carried, and to be worn when you get out onto a motorway or expressway, and says nothing about where in the car it lives.

Almost every packing list you will read says one hi-vis vest per occupant. It is good advice, and in the statutes we read it is not the law.

Germany's paragraph 53a says eine Warnweste: one vest. Keeping it within the driver's reach is how the requirement is normally described, not wording we read in the text. France's government page describes the vest in the singular and states no per-person count. Austria's paragraph 102 is written per vehicle, one set of warning clothing per multi-track car.

Italy is different in kind rather than in number. Its rule is written around wearing rather than carrying: the vest or braces must be worn by whoever steps onto the carriageway, hard shoulder or lay-by outside a built-up area at night or in poor daytime visibility. If two of you get out, two of you should have one on. That is a consequence of the wearing rule, not a stated carrying quota, and you should treat anyone who tells you Italy legally requires one vest per seat as guessing.

So: one per person is a convention with a sound safety argument behind it, and a family of four standing on a hard shoulder is precisely the case that argument was built for. Pack four. Just do not let anyone convince you that three vests in a car of four is an offence, because in the texts we read, it is not.

This is the most useful single fact on the page, and almost nobody publishes it.

Under the Loi Montagne rules, drivers in the mapped French mountain zones must have 3PMSF-marked winter tyres, or carry chains or snow socks, between 1 November and 31 March. For the 2025/26 season the obligation applies in 34 of the 48 eligible departments. The legal basis is décret n°2020-1264 of 16 October 2020, applying articles L.314-1 and R.314-1 of the code de la route. So far this matches what every other site tells you.

Here is what they leave out. The 135 euro fine written into that framework has never been activated. The decree needed to switch the sanction on had still not been published when the Sénat answered a written question on 12 February 2026, and that answer states the measure has been applied de manière pédagogique, sans sanction: in an educational manner, without penalty. A late October 2025 ministerial order on tyre categories is given as the reason for the delay.

What to do with that. Comply anyway. The obligation is real, the equipment is what gets you up an icy hairpin with children in the car, and this status has flipped before and can flip again with the next ministerial order. But make the decision on what the road demands rather than on a fine that does not currently exist, and treat any page that quotes you 135 euros without a date attached as a page that has not checked. Our wider guide to driving to the Alps: tolls, vignettes and winter tyres covers the rest of the road costs.

Both are written as conditional rules and both are widely reported as calendar mandates. The difference matters on a dry, bright fifth of November.

Austria: the obligation runs between 1 November and 15 April and applies when the road is actually wintry, meaning snow, slush or ice. On a dry road inside that window, the statute as we read it in the mirror is not engaged. On a snow-covered road inside it, it is. The alternative to winter tyres is chains on at least two wheels, with an 80 km/h cap while they are on.

Germany: no dates at all. The rule is triggered by black ice, snow, slush or frost on the road, in any month of the year. Chains are compulsory only on roads signed with Verkehrszeichen 268, and you are capped at 50 km/h while they are fitted.

Real talk: neither of those is a loophole worth planning around. A conditional rule bites the moment the road turns, which in the Alps can happen inside one afternoon, and in Germany the reported penalty for being on the wrong side of it is a fine plus a point on the Flensburg register rather than the flat 15 euros you pay for a missing triangle. Both of these rule structures reached us through mirrors and secondary aggregators rather than the government's own text, so take the shape as reliable and the exact wording as unconfirmed.

If you take one thing from this page into the car, take this. Italy has no national snow chain law. There is no article of the Codice della Strada that says the country requires chains from a given date. Instead, each region, province or road authority issues its own ordinance each winter, covering specific signed roads.

Alto Adige/Südtirol has run a 15 November to 15 April window requiring M+S or 3PMSF tyres, or chains carried on board. Regional reporting puts the penalty range there at 42 to 173 euros in a built-up area, 87 to 344 euros outside one and 80 to 318 euros on a motorway, with the vehicle liable to be held until you comply. That reporting dates from 2022 and the ordinances are reissued annually, so treat the shape as reliable and the numbers as needing a check.

The Aosta Valley, Piedmont, Trentino and Veneto each issue their own. A family driving to the Dolomites and a family driving to Courmayeur are not under the same rule, and any article that hands you one Italy-wide date range is wrong for one of them. Look up the ordinance for the specific province you are driving into, for the season you are driving in. Italy is also worth checking on a second front before you go, because it has a separate requirement that catches families out on the slopes rather than the road: see mandatory ski insurance in Italy.

What does not matter, honestly: the kit itself. The whole kit is cheap, the fines are small, and none of these countries will end your holiday over a missing triangle. If you are lying awake about this at 11pm, stop. Buy the box, put it in the car, sleep.

What is not enforced: the French breathalyser, reported abolished, with no penalty for its absence that we could find. And the French snow chain sanction, which is a live obligation with no working penalty behind it for the 2025/26 season.

What can actually cost you: an Italian provincial ordinance on a signed road, where the published range runs to 344 euros and the vehicle can be held until you comply. And the version that is not about money at all, which is the one that matters: chains you have never fitted before, in the dark, in falling snow, on a slope, with children in the car. Fit them once on a dry driveway at home. It is the single most useful thing in this guide.

If you are renting: open the boot at the depot and look before you drive away. We did not verify who carries the liability for missing equipment in a hire car in any of these countries, so the only safe assumption is that the person the officer is talking to is you.

And if all of this is putting you off driving at all, plenty of Alpine resorts are reachable without a car. See skiing the Alps by train and car-free resorts for families. If you are driving in North America instead, the equivalent rules are the traction laws, which work very differently: Colorado and California chain control.