The Polo is the car plenty of people buy in their first Dutch month and sell in their last. Road tax on a light petrol one is low, parts are everywhere, and there is always somebody after the next one.
Polos reach us in two very different states. There is the three year old one from a dealer, serviced on the dot, still on its first set of brake discs. And there is the fifteen year old one that has been through four owners and a decade of street parking. Both get an offer. The questions we ask about them have almost nothing in common.
The fifth generation covers 2009 to 2017, sold as the 6R and then the facelifted 6C. The sixth, the AW, took over in 2017 and grew a size. Petrol was the volume seller here, the 1.2 and 1.6 TDI diesels came alongside it, and the stripped back BlueMotion sat at the economical end. None of this is yours to look up. Your kenteken, the Dutch number plate, gives us the year, the fuel and the kerb weight straight out of the RDW register.
We will not quote a number on this page, it would be stale within weeks. These are the things that genuinely shift what we offer.
Early 1.2 TSI petrol engines, roughly 2009 to 2012, ran a timing chain and tensioner that could jump. It is the one thing every buyer asks about on a Polo of that age. If the chain has been replaced, the invoice is worth more to us than any amount of describing it.
Most Polos sold here are manual. Where there is an automatic it is usually the seven speed DSG with a dry clutch, and on those the part that gives trouble is the mechatronic unit, not the clutch pack. Tell us whether it hesitates between first and second from cold, and whether a garage has ever been inside it.
Every APK test and most garage visits put a mileage reading into the RDW register, and those readings sit there in sequence. On a car this old the sequence tells us more than the number currently on the dashboard. It is the first thing we look at, so give us the real figure.
A Polo with no second key, no locking wheel bolt adaptor or no parcel shelf is a Polo somebody has to go and buy those for. None of it is serious. All of it is worth saying up front, so the number does not move on the day we collect.
The register covers the facts. The rest of it is only in your head, so this is the part of the request worth a minute.
The market for it is narrower than for petrol, and the environmental zones in Amsterdam, Utrecht and The Hague are part of why. It does not stop us buying one. We price the car on what it is, and where it happens to be parked makes no difference to that.
No. A chain and tensioner job on a 1.2 TSI costs real money, and a repair carried out to get through a sale almost never earns it back. Describe the noise, say when it happens, and we build it into the offer as a known fault.
Less than people expect on a small car that has lived in a Dutch city. Kerbed alloys, a dented door and a scuffed bumper are ordinary. Photograph each one from a few steps back and we take them as read.
Four things. The registration card, the kentekencard. Both halves of the registration code, the tenaamstellingscode, which arrives with the card or separately by post. A valid passport or ID card. And every key that belongs to the car. If it is still on the old paper registration from before 2014, bring that in place of the card. The RDW transfer is our job, and the vrijwaringsbewijs is in your hand before we leave.
Your number plate is all we need to start.
