Romania for Swedish Drivers — Buy the Rovinieta, Mind the 0.0 Limit

For a Swedish driver, Romania feels familiar in the ways that matter — right-hand traffic, an EU licence that needs no paperwork, and a near-zero attitude to alcohol that matches your instincts. What surprises Swedes is a small toll-system quirk and just how different the road surface is from the smooth E-roads at home.

Start with the rovinieta. Romania charges for road use through an electronic vignette registered to your number plate rather than a toll booth or a windscreen sticker. You must hold a valid rovinieta before you drive on any national road or motorway, so buy it the moment you cross the border — online or at the first petrol station. It costs only a handful of euros for a week, but the plate-reading cameras will flag a car that does not have one. The vignette guide and the vignette calculator cover how this works across the region.

On alcohol you are already well-adapted. Sweden runs a 0.02 limit; Romania goes further to 0.0 BAC, an absolute zero. The practical advice is identical to home — do not drink and drive at all — and Romanian police enforce it with frequent roadside checks and the threat of licence confiscation.

The real adjustment is road quality. Romania has only short stretches of motorway, where 130 km/h applies. Most journeys run on single-carriageway national roads at 90 km/h, shared with horse carts, agricultural traffic and overtaking that can be bolder than you are used to. Towns are 50 km/h with active speed cameras; a typical low-level speeding ticket is RON 290-725 (about EUR 60-150), and you can model one with the speeding fine calculator.

Petrol is roughly $1.42 a litre, cheapest at supermarket forecourts, and 112 is the single emergency number. Read the rest — required equipment and winter-tyre rules — on the Romania driving guide, but the rovinieta is the only thing you genuinely cannot afford to skip on day one.