As you said that you have never gone out of Lahore and in future don't have any plans of taking the car on long trips, then in my opinion you should go for Alto VXL.
It has all the safety features like ABS, Air bags and additionally, the retractable mirrors are very good feature in local city driving. Its a pain to manually adjust the VXR mirrors. Alto's air conditioner is quite good, all the owners are satisfied. In fact, if you visit the Cultus owner's thread, you will see that Cultus owners are not very satisfied with their car's ac performance. Alto offers a much better rear leg space when compared to a Cultus.
And lastly, the rush and traffic jams are going to increase now as Govt has not only reduced car prices but also going to introduce car financing schemes for small cars with very less interest rate, so better buy auto transmission when you have the opportunity.
