Rotterdam is one of Europe's main entry points for American cars, and Dutch buyers have their own word for what to do next: natrekken, looking a car up. The RDW kentekencheck shows when a car first entered the Dutch register. It shows nothing about what happened to it in the United States.
Dutch brokers publish the 2026 RDW basic fees at around €144 and budget roughly €1,000 for the inspection and paperwork, with inland transport from the port at €300 to €1,200. Customs duty and VAT are calculated the same way as elsewhere in the EU. What makes the Netherlands different is BPM: for a car without EU type approval the RDW may assign the maximum CO2 value, and BPM on that figure can exceed the price of the car. Electric vehicles are exempt, which is why Teslas from US auctions are a large share of Dutch US imports.
Dutch trade press has repeatedly described the same pattern: a car is written off in the United States, sold at Copart or IAAI, shipped to Lithuania, repaired cheaply, given a fresh registration and sold on to the Netherlands or Germany with no trace of the American damage. Carfax data reported by Autoblog.nl found that of 177,477 US-origin cars in the Dutch register, 69,994 (39.4%) had carried a salvage title in the US. TopGear.nl summarised a separate study as an 85% chance that a US import has prior damage.
The RDW kentekencheck cannot help you here. It records the first Dutch registration and the date of first admission abroad. Whether that first life ended in a flood in Houston is only in the American record.
Copart publishes a Dutch-language landing page for buyers from the Netherlands, but its official country list has no Dutch operation. Dutch buyers bid on US inventory through an international account or a broker. The lot page shows the current listing only; earlier auction appearances and their photos have to be looked up by VIN.
Every guide in this hub ends the same way because every destination shares the same blind spot. Netherlands's registry, inspection and customs process each verify something real, and none of them reads the American title, the insurer's total-loss declaration or the auction record. Enter the VIN above to see which of those records exist for the car you are looking at. The preview is free; the report is $19.99, once.
Clean, salvage, rebuilt, flood, junk. Issued by a US state, invisible in every European registry.
How it is checkedCopart and IAAI intake photos, damage codes and sale price, from every sale the car went through, not only the current lot.
How it is checkedReadings at US titles, registrations and inspections in date order. A reading below an earlier one is a rollback.
How it is checkedDuty of 10% on vehicle value plus freight, VAT of 21% on the total including duty, shipping from the US, RDW inspection fees, and BPM. BPM depends on CO2 and, for cars without EU type approval, on the value the RDW assigns; for a large-engined petrol car it can be the biggest line. Electric cars are BPM-exempt.
Roadworthiness and conformity: lighting, emissions class, identification. It does not check whether the car was previously written off, flooded or rolled back in the United States.
No. The kentekencheck shows Dutch registration data and the date of first admission. The American title, insurance and auction history exist only in US sources and are reached by VIN.
Roughly, but the thresholds differ: US insurers total a car at a lower share of its value than Dutch or German insurers do, so a US salvage car may be less damaged than the word suggests, or far more. The auction photos are how you tell.
Enter the VIN to see which US and Canadian records exist. The preview is free; the report is $19.99, once.