The Dutch vehicle authority (RDW) keeps track of all the vehicles that are registered in the Netherlands. The dataset that results from this contains a lot of information about the vehicles and is openly available to the public. In this blog post, I analyse the data from this dataset to find out where cars in the Netherlands originate from.

In recent times, there has been a lot of discussion about Chinese car brands entering the European market at very low prices compared to their European counterparts. This made me wonder to what extent these Chinese car manufacturers have already penetrated the Dutch market and how this compares to manufacturers from other countries. Therefore, I decided to use the RDW vehicle registration dataset to create an overview of the countries of origin of cars in the Netherlands.

The dataset

The dataset that I have used for this analysis is called the "Gekentekende voertuigen" dataset, which translates to "Registered vehicles". This dataset can be found here on the RDW open data portal and downloaded by everyone. The dataset is saved in an CSV format with 98 different columns with each row containing data for a single vehicle. For this analysis, I have mainly focused on the "Merk" (brand) column, which contains the brand name of a vehicle.

How was it done

For this analysis I made use of a combination of Shell and Python scripts. For the final visualisations of the results in a world map, I made use of the Folium library. The Folium library allows for the creation of interactive maps in Python by leveraging the Leaflet.js library. By clicking the "CODE" button at the bottom of the page you can take a closer look at the code for this project and by clicking the "BLOG" button you can view the blog post about the entire data analysis.

Future updates

The plan for this project is to write an annual update to keep track of changes in the data. The first update is planned for January 2026 after which an annual blog post will be made every January. These future updates are also planned to contain comparisons with previous results.