Mercedes-Benz European Delivery Program
Four of the awesomest days ever with our new GLA250 for 1,150 km in Germany, Switzerland and Austria.
I never thought I’d be the type to get a Mercedes, let alone pick it up from the factory in Germany.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Mercedes. My grandmother drove a classic, early-‘70s 280SE for years, and it was a great car. But they always seemed beyond my means — until this year.
The new GLA250 crossover (and CLA250 sedan companion) seems like it has folks like me squarely in its crosshairs. The new entry-level Merc has a tempting starting price. And you can save even more if you pick it up from the factory outside of Stuttgart, Germany. Yes, really.
The lease on my Mini Countryman expires next month, so I started doing my research early this year. It was the first time I had leased, and therefore first time I had a hard deadline to make a decision. Usually I have in mind exactly what kind of car I want. This time I was all over the place. Sedan? SUV? Crossover? Wagon? Domestic or import?
I even considered another Countryman, this time an S model with a peppier engine. I searched dealer inventory and found that by the time I added all the options I wanted, the price was higher than I was comfortable paying. And they didn’t even offer some of the newer safety features, like blind spot warning.
So I started searching the usual websites, plus Consumer Reports for ideas. I made a list. Then a spreadsheet. I compared my top eight or so cars on price, options, engines, you name it.
I was leaning toward a fully-loaded Mazda CX-5.
Then, a friend took me to test drive some of my top candidates. He talked me into driving the Mercedes GLA250, which I’d included on my spreadsheet but all but written off for being too expensive once nicely equipped.
Oh, and I drove it first. Before the GMC, Nissan and Mazda.
I was done. It was a dream to drive. Smooth and powerful and comfortable. None of the others compared.
I liked it so much, I decided I’d rather have a lightly equipped Merc than a fully-loaded anything else. Besides, it comes standard with a ton of features, including the safety ones I wanted.
While I was on the Mercedes website, building and pricing one for argument’s sake, I came across a page for their European Delivery Program.
Not only do you save 5–7% off MSRP by picking it up at the factory outside Stuttgart, Germany, but you also save the almost $1,000 delivery fee. You also get a free night in a hotel, free meal, tour of the factory and admission to their museum. Mercedes also provides you with 15 days of European insurance and ships the car for no additional cost from a number of European cities. Your dealer clears it through customs and inspects it, then you pick it up. So you basically get a new car twice.
Oh, and you can lease with it.
Now, normally I would just file this information away. But I was already planning a trip to the UK with my tweenage son in late July. It’s a short, fairly cheap flight almost anywhere on the Continent from there. Even better, we have friends who own a restaurant in the Swiss Alps, and my son had been wanting to visit. When were we ever going to be able to do that? Maybe we could actually make all of this work.
I had a lot of questions. It was already late March, so our trip was coming up soon. I called a couple local Orange County dealers for more information about the program, but didn’t get a lot of help. So I consulted Google and found a website for Herbert Haemmer from MB of Escondido near San Diego. He specializes in the European Delivery Program and had answers for all of my questions.
Herbert and I emailed back and forth for about two weeks, while I also messaged our Swiss friends to coordinate the timing of our potential visit. How cool would it be if this all actually worked?!
By some miracle, it all came together. In early May, I ordered the car with the exact specifications (very few) that I wanted, in the color I wanted, and made a deposit (which also served as my down payment).
I got an estimated lease payment, but Herbert told me I’d do the actual finance application in mid-June. That made me a little nervous, but it all worked out as estimated. I researched a ton of flights, and decided to fly in and out of Munich.
My pick up date at the Mercedes-Benz factory in Sindelfingen was Monday, July 27. My drop-off date was July 30, and Herbert estimated that it would be ready to pick up at the dealer very close to my Sept. 20 Mini lease end.
Within days of my deposit, I got an email and a package from the Mercedes-Benz European Delivery Program. It was a ton of information, everything from detailed descriptions of how everything would work, to my German registration and a power-of-attorney forms to clear the car through customs. I even got a cool leather wallet for my taxi and meal vouchers.
The last week of June, I got all my lease documents via Fed Ex, signed, and returned them. My first payment would be due Sept. 1.
Not once did I ever go to MB Escondido, and my first visit will be to pick up my car. My only dealer visits were two test drives in Orange County (yes, two to be sure!).
Last but not least, I got a folder via FedEx from Herbert. It included another taxi voucher, train tickets from Munich to Stuttgart that he had booked us, and a personalized suggested itinerary. He even included printouts of European traffic signs.
On my end, I printed out Google driving directions between each location we planned to visit and put them in a binder, and got the international driver’s license required in Austria.
We would only have a few days with the car, but I planned a fun itinerary, including a trip to see the Matterhorn at Zermatt and two Alpine coasters in Austria for my roller-coaster-loving son.
Oh, and we would have to drive our brand new car onto a train to go through a tunnel into the Alps!
After months of counting down the days, we finally flew from LAX to Heathrow, and then to Munich, where we caught a taxi to the train station and a train to Stuttgart. I used the taxi voucher Herbert provided me for the ride from the Munich airport to the train station.
We left Los Angeles Saturday afternoon, arrived in Munich via Heathrow on Sunday afternoon, and Stuttgart at 8:30 p.m. It was my first time in Germany (and Switzerland and Austria) and I had done a few months of German study on the Duolingo app, but was still far from proficient. Luckily, most people speak English.
The Mercedes-booked hotel, Hotel Am Schlossgarten, was right across the street from the train station. It was very nice, and even my son was impressed. We walked a few blocks to grab dinner, then got some much-needed sleep before the big day.
The next morning, we had breakfast at the hotel. It was a nice buffet with a variety of offerings and we sat on an outdoor patio overlooking a park. I got a pretzel and some museli (carbs don’t count on vacation), my son had bacon and Nutella. The coffee was really good, too.
We grabbed our bags, checked out, and used a voucher to take a taxi to Sindelfingen, about a 30 minute ride.
There, we were greeted by a huge Mercedes logo and a fountain in front of the Center for Excellence. We brought our bags to the front counter where they took them and gave us a claim check. We then proceeded to a desk where a woman had me sign some additional documentation and got our European insurance information, as well as tickets for the factory tour at 10:30 a.m. She booked our delivery for 9:30.
We had time to kill, so we went upstairs to the delivery lounge. They have wifi. They have a barista serving complimentary drinks and snacks. It’s awesome.
And you have a view of all the fabulous cars getting picked up.
It is here that my son discovered the joys of cappuccino, something that became a theme for him the rest of the trip.
Finally, my name was called. We were greeted by a friendly technician wearing a black suit and an accent that reminded me of Peter Sellers in “Dr. Strangelove.” He led us down the stairs and to meet my new car. It was everything I had hoped for!
While he went over different features of the car, a valet showed up with our luggage and dutifully loaded it in the back. The technician set the speedometer to kilometers, and got me a loaner GPS unit since I didn’t opt for navigation on my car (I use Waze, anyway). He also provided me with a yellow vest, triangle and first-aid kit required when driving in Austria, a city driving permit sticker and a big, white oval sticker with a black “D” on it for Deutschland.
I always thought those were vanity stickers, but it turns out they are required if driving out of your registered country in Europe. So now I have a D sticker.
We ended up with the D sticker, a city permit, and toll stickers — “vignettes” — for Switzerland and Austria (purchased at petrol stations). The Swiss one is good through the end of 2015 if we want to drive back there (ha, ha I wish!).
Once we finished our introductions, we wandered over to the gift shop to browse. They had a remote-control version of my car, but I opted for a Matchbox-sized version (which turns out to be a similar European model, but not my actual one). I bought a baseball cap and simple keychain, but refrained from going too overboard.
From there, we headed to meet up with our factory tour. We donned safety goggles and an earpiece to hear our guide and boarded a bus to the first location. Unfortunately, no photos were permitted, but we got this one in the waiting room.
The factory campus is huge, like its own city. Our first stop was an assembly line for S-Class and Maybach. My son said he wants a Maybach. I told him he better be prepared to live in it because it costs almost as much as our house.
Robots were everywhere. And they were creepy and scary precise. At one station, a robot picks up the entire dashboard, swings it through the air, just squeezes it in the chassis through the driver’s side, and screws it in place. At another station, workers affix the model letters on the back of the cars.
Another building houses robots welding metal pieces together. It smells terrible in there and the robots there are extra scary because they have sparks flying from them.
My son and I decided robots would make a pretty scary haunted house theme.
Workers there had cool kick scooters to move parts around. I wish I could have got a photo.
Once we wrapped up the tour, we headed back upstairs to the restaurant for our complimentary lunch. It was very chichi, white linen tablecloths and all. A little too fancy for my son. But he got some good grilled salmon, and I got a pot roast with funny noodles that looked like Cap’n Crunch. The best part was the dessert sample plate, which included a Mercedes star made from powdered sugar.
After lunch, it was time to hit the road. We grabbed a couple boxes of Mercedes water, entered our destination in the GPS and slowly drove out the sliding glass doors. They wished us “Gute Fahrt” (“Nice Trip”), much to our amusement. Fart jokes always hit the mark with 12-year-old boys.
For the next seven hours, we became acquainted with our new car. I took it on the Autobahn, on two-lane roads, through roundabouts and, inexplicably, through the middle of a farm and a construction site (thanks, GPS!). We even drove it on the back of a train into a tunnel to get to our friends’ restaurant in the Alps. It drove fabulously. [Video]
We spent the next two nights in Baltschieder, Switzerland, seeing the Matterhorn in Zermatt and attending a fun family barbecue with our hosts. My only regret is that we didn’t get to spend more time with our friends and exploring Switzerland. It was so amazing, it was almost unreal. Zermatt felt so incredibly perfect, it was like the Disney version of the Matterhorn, only 1,000 times better. We definitely need to go back.
Oh, and we had a couple great meals at Restaurant Baltschiederbach, which I highly recommend if you are ever fortunate enough to be on the Valis portion of Switzerland!
Our third day with the car, we drove from Baltschieder to Innsbruck. My Google maps grossly underestimated the amount of time it would take, even with our two detours to alpine coasters. We spent close to nine hours on the road, the vast majority of it on two-lane, winding mountain roads through impossibly beautiful towns.
We took another car train and had a harrowing drive up, then back down the other side of, the hairpin curves of the Oberalp Pass above Andermatt [Video]. We spent that night in Innsbruck, Austria.
Thursday, our last day with the car and more than 1,100 kilometers later, we drove to Munich airport and dropped it off at Loginout, the designated Mercedes drop-0ff spot I had arranged to leave it. After about 20 minutes of paperwork (and my son helping himself to the tiny packets of Haribo gummies in the office), we bid adieu and walked about 50 yards to the terminal for our flight back to the UK.
According to the tracking website Loginout gave me, our car left Bremerhaven port on Aug. 9 (coincidentally the same day we flew home from the UK). I’m told that the ship is estimated to arrive in Long Beach Sept. 3. From there, it goes through customs, then MB Escondido picks it up for an inspection and delivery.
I just found a website that lets me track the ship it’s on. It just passed Jacksonville, Fla. and is on its way to the Panama Canal.
My Mini’s lease ends Sept. 20. Herbert says my new car should be ready to pick up right around Sept. 21. Which also happens to be the same day he gets back from his own trip to Germany.
Who can blame him?
We’re already planning our next trip.
