Greece on a Dutch Licence — 130 km/h Motorways & Island-Ferry Roads

Most Dutch trips to Greece are island trips, and that changes what actually matters behind the wheel. The paperwork is the part you can forget about — your EU licence is valid for up to 12 months and no IDP is needed. What surprises Dutch drivers is the road itself.

The first jolt is speed. Greek motorways run at 130 km/h, a full 30 above the Dutch 100, and the traffic moves to match it. There is nothing wrong with sitting at the limit, but you will be overtaken by locals who treat the inside lane as optional, so leave a wider gap than you would on the A2. Towns are 50 and the open road 90. Enforcement is real — both fixed gantries and mobile radar — and roughly 10 km/h over carries a fine of about EUR 40, usually settled on the spot, so keep a card to hand.

Off the motorway network the picture flips entirely. Greece’s own driving conditions are rated only moderate for a reason: outside the toll roads you meet variable surfaces, faded markings, mountain switchbacks with no barrier, and genuinely aggressive overtaking. On the islands, add narrow village lanes, scooters threading past, and ferry ramps that demand confident low-speed manoeuvring with a queue watching. None of this is dangerous if you slow down and read the road rather than the sign.

The alcohol limit matches home at 0.05, so there is no nasty surprise there — but summer policing on the coast and islands is aggressive, and the penalties run to licence confiscation, so treat it as zero. Petrol sits around $1.92 a litre; the supermarket-attached stations are noticeably cheaper than the motorway ones. The emergency number is 112 across the country.

Before you collect the keys, it is worth a two-minute sanity check on the rules you will actually be tested on. Confirm your documents with the Driving Permit Checker and, if you want to know what a lead foot could cost, run the numbers through the Speeding Fine Calculator. Pack light, download offline maps for the islands where signal drops, and give yourself an easy first hour before you tackle a mountain road.