Is Iceland safe to drive yourself?
The car rental counter at Keflavík Airport is always busy. Visitors collect their keys, load up on insurance options they half-understand, and drive into a landscape that looks, from the terminal window, like it should be easy. Wide roads, no traffic, open sky. Forty minutes later, somewhere on a coastal highway, the wind picks up. Not a gentle breeze — a sideways force that pushes the car half a lane over. The weather app still says partly cloudy. The sky disagrees. And somewhere ahead, a single-lane bridge appears with no warning, and another car is already on it. This is Iceland. It is absolutely safe to drive — but it is nothing like driving anywhere else you have been. The honest answer: Yes, but… Let’s get this out of the way: Iceland is not a dangerous country to drive in. The roads are well-maintained, the infrastructure is modern, crime is virtually nonexistent, and Icelanders are calm, courteous drivers. If you have experience driving in varied conditions and you do your homework, self-driving is perfectly viable. But Iceland’s challenges have nothing to do with the roads and everything to do with what happens above and around them. The weather is the
