Paid street parking in the Netherlands works by licence plate. You no longer put a ticket behind your windscreen: the parking officer or the scan car checks the system to see whether your plate has been paid for. Your account therefore holds a vehicle rather than a loose plate, and without a vehicle you cannot start a parking action. Adding one is free and takes half a minute.
How to add a vehicle
The screen is called Vehicles and sits in your profile. If your list is still empty it says No vehicles yet, with a line telling you to tap + to add a new vehicle.
- Tap Profile at the bottom and choose Vehicles.
- Tap the plus button at the top right.
- Enter the plate under License plate and tap Next.
- Check the details the app looks up and tap Next once more.
The vehicle is now in your list and you can park with it straight away. You do not have to think of a name: the app fills one in and you can change it later.
What the app fills in for you
You do not need to type dashes, spaces or lower-case letters. The plate field strips them and switches to capitals, so "1-abc-23" becomes 1ABC23 by itself. For a Dutch plate the app looks the vehicle up at the RDW (the Dutch vehicle authority) and puts the result in the check step: Brand, Model and Year. If that describes a different car from the one in front of you, you mistyped a character. Go back a step and correct it.
The name your vehicle gets is built from your first name and the brand: "Sanne's Volkswagen", or "Sanne's car" when the brand is unknown. That name is for you only; enforcement looks at the plate and nothing else.
When adding does not work
The app then shows one of these messages:
- Vehicle not found: "We could not find any data for this license plate. Check whether the license plate was entered correctly." Usually a character has been swapped, or the plate belongs to a country you still have to pick.
- Vehicle already exists: this plate is already in your account. You will find it in the list.
- Unable to add vehicle: we cannot link this vehicle to your account. Contact support about it.
The next step
If you drive more than one car, choose which one is preselected when you start; that is in Setting a default vehicle. After that you only need credit to be able to park, see Setting up payment for your first trip.