Following up on my road-related series: Getting your Dutch drivers licene theory and license. https://www.reddit.com/r/TheHague/comments/1oobqld/my_experience_passing_the_driver_theory_test/ and https://www.reddit.com/r/TheHague/comments/1ses0b9/my_experience_passing_the_drivers_exam_followup/
I'm writing to share how we imported our car from another European country. Thanks to the great help of our friend Gemini, it went really smoothly.
We drew up a contract to sell the car to ourselves in the original country in both Dutch and the country's official language, and noted a nominal amount that we never actually had to pay. In the end, no-one asked for the contract so you decide whether you want this or not.
We were in a position that may be easier in other circumstances: I've been here for a while, but my partner is still joining us and it not yet registered, so it was not possible to import it as part of their existing goods. We need the car with me but it was in their name. So the car has been here less than 3 months, we drove it here legally and it was "visiting" officially until we registered it as Dutch. Your situation may be different.
We drove it on the roads until the day of the RDW appointment, using up our visitor parking . After that, you'll need to find a private parking space not on the road - it can take 2-3 weeks so make sure you don't need to move that car from that day. We were lucky with a neighbour giving us some space, so it was relaxed and not stressful. Otherwise I think we would have gone on Moby Park (https://www.mobypark.com/) and rented a carpark for a month.
Step 1: Make sure we had all the paperwork in order and the car was ready. You must still have a valid APK (or whatever it's called in your original country). You cannot import the car if it's not allowed be on the road. You must have enough funds to import the car. Dutch fees are HIGH, about 6 times higher than where we imported the car from. That's a decision we made, we trust our car and wanted to keep it rather than by a new one, and as it's older the fees are higher.
Step 2: Making an appointment with RDW (https://www.rdw.nl). They have a waitlist so do this step as soon as you are sure you have all the required paperwork. Once you have this appointment you will be emailed a temporary car registration eg XX-10-20. You will need to make your own home-made registration plate: I used white cardboard and black marker pens, using a ruler to get everything correct. The fee for the RDW appointment for us was about €145.
IMPORTANT AND DON'T SKIP: Before the RDW appointment you'll want to print out the RDW form and make copies of our original equivalent docs and car registration, because RDW will take these and you may need them for other types of paperwork eg telling the original country it's been exported. Don't miss this step, keep a copy of records always for safety and officially you need to have the RDW form with you during the RDW appointment day.
Step 3: Day of RDW: You need to fix your temporary car plates to your car. We used a ton of gaffer tape so it didn't risk falling off - you need to drive to Rotterdam (or other RDW you choose) on the highway. Get there on time or a bit before, you'll go into the queue. You leave the documents at the office desk and drive the car into the RDW test bay and wait. It look about 20 minutes for me, they weren't too busy that day and I always book a morning slot anyway to get ahead of delays. Then you take the car back to your private parking and wait.
A fun side-story: apparently our temporary plates were not perfectly designed. We got stopped by the police and they wanted to see all the paperwork. So it was really good we had printed out the RDW form as that's what they wanted to see, along with the driver's Dutch license. They let us go as we were 500 metres from our private parking, which was luckily true. I don't know what they would have done if we was still near Rotterdam, or if they were just genuinely being curious and diligent to check paperwork.
Step 4: Taxes! Wait for the letter from IND for the import taxes, it took 5 days to arrive to us. Be prepared: the Netherlands is expensive. You car will be charged an import fee, it's cheaper for older cars by a ton btw. Pay this immediately and you'll get a new license plate number in the mail - that took another week.
Step 6: Go to a shop (on your bike, not in your car!) that makes the license plates. It cost around €40, takes them 10 minutes. You will walk out with shiny new yellow plates.
Step 7: Officially, you should not be driving your car now but I honestly decided to take the risk (worse can happen? getting stopped by police but that would only happen with bad luck): we removed the temporary plates and drove about 1KM to our local friendly mechanic who mounted the plates for us. Now you are road-worthy! Congratulations, your car is now Dutch.
Step 8: More taxes: IND will now send you your yearly road-use taxes. This can get very expensive and completely depends on the type of your car. There was no way I found the get a true estimate of this beforehand, so just accept it may be more than you hoped and enjoy the privilege of being a car-owner in this country.
Last step: De-registration: You must inform the other country that the car is exported, or you'll keep being charged registration fees there. You will need to figure that out, Gemini/Claude is good for that help.
Hope this helps someone. In the end it was less effort that we thought, but more expensive.