Amsterdam - Post Report Question and Answers
What kind of car do you recommend bringing to post, given the terrain, availability of parts, burglary/carjacking risks, etc.? What kind of car do you advise not to bring?
The smaller, the better. The parking spaces are small here. In Amsterdam the roads can be narrow. We drive a mid-sized American SUV and it is one of the biggest SUV's I've seen here. Parking is a challenge and is almost never free. Replacement parts for U.S. vehicles will be very expensive if they can be found but more likely will have to be shipped. - Oct 2014
Many government staff did not have cars, and it is perfectly possible to live well without a car since there are so many public transport options. However, we did bring a car (VW station wagon, but anything is fine) so that we could take road trips to nearby countries with our family since it is cheaper and more comfortable than trains when traveling as a family. Gas is expensive, but--like I said--we only used our car for trips so we had good gas mileage driving on the highways. We almost never used a car in Amsterdam for our daily commute. We did have an issue with replacing our stereo (our car was broken into, which was pretty common for VWs and Audis that have GPS built into the dash). We had the repairs to the door and window done with Dutch parts but we shipped a replacement stereo from our dealer in the U.S. to the Dutch VW dealer to install it. However, no issues having our regularly scheduled maintenance taken care of there. - Jun 2014
