Ranked: The best countries for a European road trip
Italy, Malta and Denmark have been named as the best road trip destinations in Europe.
The Škoda European Adventure Index is described by the Czech car maker as the “guide of guides” as it uses data from hundreds of existing online reviews.
To help filter the results Škoda selected three different categories: Environment, Adventure and Road Safety and Camping.
The Environment group rated each country based on air pollution, carbon emissions, Environmental Performance Index and the number of World Heritage sites within its borders. Italy came top with and overall score of 83.4 points, with Germany only a fraction behind on 83.3 and France following on 82.9 points. The UK didn’t even make the top ten.
To score countries for Adventure Škoda turned to TripAdvisor reviews and tallied up the number of average reviews, activities per 1,000km and activities per 100,000 people. The island of Malta took firts place with 98.1 points, with Cyprus and Portugal completing the top three.
The Road Safety and Camping category sought to identify the countries with the safest driving and the most campsites, and measured the number of campsites per 10,000km, the number of traffic incidents per 100,000 people and the number of road deaths per million people. All considered Denmark did the best, with a score of 83.8, while the Netherlands and Ireland came in second and third.
The full index can be found on the Škoda website.
However, what is noticeably absent in Škoda’s study is any mention of how enjoyable the roads of Europe are to drive. Thankfully, that’s where Detour comes in with our hundreds of different road trip ideas, all based on real driving experiences. A small sample of some of our favourite European road trips is below or you can use our site’s search feature to find inspiration for your next adventure.
A few laps of a track, a blast into the hills above Seville and an insight into the life of a road tester, courtesy of Stephen Dobie.