APK for expats: what is checked and what fails

What the inspector actually looks at

An APK is a safety and emissions test, not a quality review of your car. The inspector works through a fixed list: brakes (thickness, play, the handbrake, leaks), tyres (tread depth of at least 1.6 mm, damage, the right size), steering and suspension (play in the joints, shock absorbers, springs), lights (all of them working, headlight aim), the body and chassis (rust in load-bearing parts), seat belts, the windscreen (cracks in the driver’s field of view) and emissions. On a diesel that includes the smoke measurement, which at us is part of the €70.

What is not checked: how well the car drives, the state of the clutch or gearbox, the air-conditioning, or whether the service is due. A car can sail through an APK and still need work — which is why a service and an APK are different things.

The points that fail most often

In our workshop the same handful of items come back again and again:

• Lights. One dead bulb is enough to fail. It is also the cheapest thing to fix beforehand.
• Tyres. Below 1.6 mm of tread, uneven wear, or a tyre that is damaged on the sidewall.
• Brakes. Discs worn past their minimum thickness, or a handbrake that no longer holds well enough.
• Play in the suspension. Ball joints and track rod ends — you often feel this as a knock over speed bumps.
• Rust on load-bearing parts. Surface rust is fine; rust that has eaten through a sill or a subframe is not.
• Windscreen damage in the area the driver looks through.

If you know something is already wrong, say so when you book. Tell us what you suspect and we will explain what a repair would cost.

Failed — what happens then

You get the report point by point, and from us a price for each item, so you can decide what to do rather than accept a single lump sum. You are allowed to have the repair done wherever you like.

An expired APK is not only a fine: your insurance can refuse to pay after an accident, and that is the expensive part.

Foreign licence plates

This is the question we get most from people who have just arrived. An APK is tied to the Dutch vehicle register, so a car on a Polish, German, Ukrainian, Bulgarian or any other foreign plate cannot be given an APK — not by us, not by anyone else in the country. The route is to register the car in the Netherlands first; from that moment the APK rules apply to it like any other Dutch car.

In the meantime we can do a technical check from €100: the same points an inspector would look at, with a written result, so you know what the car needs. That booking is arranged by a person rather than our chatbot — write to us on WhatsApp and someone will pick it up.

Frequently asked questions