Seeing Iceland on a Road Trip

Is the Best Way to See Iceland Via a Road Trip?

The freedom you experience when you travel through another country in a rental car is amazing, and after wandering and driving around Iceland for more than a week, I can confidently say that road trips are amazing, and road trips in Iceland are absolutely unforgettable. There are a few different options for traveling through Iceland, but I’m of the opinion that if you can drive yourself, you should drive yourself.

One of the primary benefits of driving yourself around Iceland is that you can spend as much or as little time as your schedule allows at each place you visit. If you want to spend a full two hours having a windy picnic lunch in front of a waterfall, you can certainly do that. On the flip side, if you’re traveling as part of a group tour or via a bus, you might not get to enjoy everything you want as you want.

One of the reasons a road trip makes so much sense when you visit Iceland is because of the island’s relatively manageable size. If you were to pluck the entire country out of the ocean and plunk it down in one of the United States, you could fit the whole country inside the state of Colorado. At around 103,000 square kilometers, the country of Iceland is certainly and easily drivable.

Other options for getting around Iceland include taking small flights to regional airports or joining a group tour via bus, van, or taxi transport. If you’re not used to driving regularly, one of these options might suit you, but driving in Iceland is not at all scary or confusing. The country is very spread out, and it’s easy to take a leisurely drive around the entire island in a few weeks.

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How is the Driving in Iceland?

If you’ve got experience driving in a country with crazy traffic, busy streets, and drivers who travel at Mach speed whenever they can, Iceland won’t feel at all difficult when you’re behind the wheel. If I were to compare it to some of the busier European regions (maybe Paris or Rome), there’s just no comparison as far as traffic jams and crazy drivers go.

Having driven – or at least witnessed the traffic – in several different countries, I’d compare the general feel of Icelandic traffic to that of a medium city, something in suburban America. Even when you’re driving through the cities and towns, the road signs are easy to read and aren’t too overabundant. Likewise, even when you have some cars around you in busy traffic, it’s really not that chaotic.

I’d say the one area where you might have an issue is with the vehicles available for rent. As of this writing, many of the vehicles available as rentals in Iceland have a standard transmission, which means you have to know how to operate a clutch and a stick shift. If you have no idea what that sentence means and have no experience with a standard transmission, it’s important to book your rental carefully or risk not being able to drive to your scheduled visits.

There are certainly automatic vehicles available for rent, but you often need to request one specifically or pay a little more money for the luxury of not having to use a stick shift. When I visited Iceland with my traveling partner in 2022, we had no issues because we could both drive a standard transmission. If you haven’t yet learned, make sure you do so before you travel to Iceland, or make sure you rent the right type of vehicle.

What Kind of Car Should You Rent in Iceland?

If you’re thinking about heading out on a road trip in Iceland, it’s usually a good idea to drive a vehicle with 4×4 capabilities. When I was researching different places to visit, it was clear that the terrain was quite challenging and required a vehicle with good ground clearance and 4×4 or all-wheel-drive functionality.

Since my trip occurred in the summer, you’d think I wouldn’t have needed to worry about snow, but Iceland is actually home to glaciers, which never melt (we’re not going to get into the long-term melting of the world’s glaciers due to a changing climate here; for the sake of argument, let’s just assume that you can see glaciers in Iceland if you visit there now, but the future is uncertain!).

However, one of the activities I booked was a snowmobile ride on a glacier, and that glacier was huge, thick, snowy, and very blindingly white. There’s no chance a vehicle could have reached the vast plain of the glacier, so we just drove to a place below the glacier and were bussed up to the staging point. The capabilities of our vehicle didn’t even come into play.

But we did cover some miles that weren’t on paved roads. When we visited the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, some of the roads along the far western coast were hugely bumpy and wonky. Very rural, but they led us to some amazing sights. Also, we drove through some lava fields where a low-profile car or a little bitty Mini would have had quite the challenge. My recommendation is to get at least a medium-sized SUV and consider one with a 4×4 or AWD.

How To Research Your Iceland Road Trip

There are actually quite a few very informative and credible articles about Iceland on the web. You can find a wealth of information from tour companies and businesses that advertise Icelandic tourism. I started my research by looking at the tour sites and examining their itineraries. At first, I was considering buying a tour, but I was booking too close to our departure date, so most of the tours were sold out.

I feel like that actually ended up working out in our favor since it was so amazing driving around Iceland on our own without the onus of a tour bus driver waving us back onto the vehicle. While I did book a handful of tours on our overall trip, the actual itinerary we followed was accomplished on our own without any involvement from a company.

Once I figured out all of the major sights I wanted to see, as well as the general areas where our road trip would occur, it was time to fill in my itinerary with specific stops and scenic adventures we’d see along the way. I knew I wanted to explore the Snæfellsnes Peninsula, which is in the west, as well as Thingvellir National Park, north of Reykjavik, and the southern Icelandic coastline with its glaciers, beaches, and waterfalls.

I actually went to Google Maps and “drove” our route, bit by bit, looking for different things to see. If you click on Google Maps in any given area and then click “Things to Do,” a series of little icons will appear on the map that represent potential stops. I looked at all these things and added them, beat by beat, to our itinerary. If you’re going to have your own car and your own timeline, I highly recommend this method for choosing things to see.

How Many Days is an Iceland Road Trip?

The length of your Icelandic road trip will often depend on how many days you have available from work and your budget, and you can use the number of days you have available to craft a suitable itinerary. I was in Iceland for a little more than a week, and I focused on the southern and western parts of Iceland, with a little bit of glacier fun in the central part of the country.

I don’t think I’d have been able to see any more of the country without having to rush around from place to place. If circumnavigation of Iceland is something you’d like to do (that means driving the entire way around the whole island), I’d recommend taking at least two weeks to accomplish this. Only with that much time would you have the opportunity to make lots of stops and really get a feel for all the amazing natural wonders throughout the country.

If you’re super short on time, or you just don’t have enough budget to stay for an entire week, let alone two weeks, I would recommend driving north of Reykjavik and visiting the Snæfellsnes Peninsula as your primary destination. There are loads and loads of cool things to see there. I’d say spending one day in Reykjavik and two days exploring the peninsula would be the absolute minimum you could spend and appreciate the country.

If you have a few more days, I’d add Thingvellir National Park, which is mildly touristy but amazing nevertheless. Thingvellir is an easy jaunt north of Reykjavik, and you could even choose to take a tour bus to the park if you wanted to limit your overall driving time. Honestly, anything you get to see in Iceland will just knock you over with how cool it is. Even if you just have four days for your itinerary, you can definitely make your time worth it in a rental car.

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