Nearly 12 percent of all cars in the Netherlands are Volkswagen –

On January 1 of this year, the Dutch fleet consisted of no less than 9.2 million cars. More than one in ten of them belongs to Volkswagen. This and more is clear from AutoWeek’s analysis of numbers from the RDC and Rai Association.

At the beginning of the month, you can read in detail on AutoWeek.nl about the number of new passenger cars registered in the Netherlands in the previous month. We discuss the brands with the most new cars, the model with the most copies, and we also take a look at the most popular brands and models in the electric space. In addition, we regularly look in detail at the current year-to-date performance. But what does the Dutch fleet actually look like? We will also plan this for you. For example, we recently wrote that the fleet will grow by 90 thousand passenger cars between 2022 and 2023, that only 4 percent of the fleet is fully electric and that the number of cars with a manual gearbox in our country is rapidly decreasing. Now we take a closer look at the brands that have the highest number of cars on the road in the Netherlands. The absolute number is perhaps not surprising.

You may have already felt it coming, but in fact: Volkswagen is the brand with the largest number of cars in our country. Of the 9,233,107 cars in the Dutch fleet on 1 January 2023, at least 1,074,011 were Volkswagen. This means that 11.6% of all cars driving in the Netherlands carry the Volkswagen logo. 275,057 of them were Polo, and 266,682 were Golf. This means that 5.9 percent of all cars in the Netherlands are Golf or Polo. private.

No other car brand has more than a million units on the road in our country. In second place we find – at a considerable distance – Opel. The Dutch passenger car fleet consists of 663,424 Opel cars. This means that approximately 7.2 percent of the Dutch fleet is an Opel. Similar numbers and ratios can be found in numbers four (Toyota) and five (Peugeot). There are still 652,223 Toyota vehicles registered in the Netherlands, making the brand good for about 7.1 percent of the Dutch car fleet. Of all passenger cars in the Netherlands, 7 percent are Peugeot cars (647,326 units).

Interesting facts: 0.71 percent of the Dutch vehicle fleet consisted of Tesla cars at the beginning of this year (65,194 units). With the huge number of Tesla Model Y vehicles registered this year, next year is sure to yield very different numbers. Also interesting: Despite withdrawing from Europe and thus from the Netherlands nearly eleven years ago, there are still more Daihatsu vehicles (49,541 units, 0.54 percent) on the road than Alfa Romeo (44,846 units), Land Rover ( 37,055 units). units), Saab (32,472 units), Lexus (24,718 units), Jaguar (24,350 units), Subaru (22,775 units) and Smart (20,426 units). With more than 21,000 units, the Cuore remains the most popular Daihatsu vehicle in the Netherlands.

Super stuff

If we look at the absolute ‘elite brands’, Porsche is only slightly behind Alfa Romeo with 44,565 cars in the Netherlands. In addition, there are 3,005 Ferraris in the Netherlands, 2,524 Maserati, 2,205 Bentley, 1,531 Aston Martins, 1,143 Rolls-Royce, 999 Lotus, 589 Lamborghini and 191 McLaren.