European delivery programs

["John Hertzman" <johnhertzman@domain.elided>]

Norm Sippel, Greg Youngblood and George Graves posted notes on past practices
of buying cars at the factory, saving bundles, etcetera. There were good
deals, but nothing very arcane. My wife and I bought our first new car in the
fifties, a VW, US-spec, delivered in Glasgow, ordered through a U.S. dealer,
price $1,310. The savings about paid our airfare (on Icelandic) but not the
whole summer. The dealer got a cut for doing the paperwork, but didn't pay
interest to the bank for the loan to keep the car on his high-rent showroom
floor until he had to sell it at an off-price at the end of summer. One could
do it anytime, with most makes, but most such purchases were summer, in the
slow months before the next year model introductions. These were generally
factory programs- the factories were not lobbying Congress to prevent it, at
least not while I was watching. Fred and a bunch of his friends (on an
"Andiamo" tour) bought a slew of Milanos, and I'm reasonably sure it was a
factory program, but they had to pick them up in Germany and drop them off in
Germany if they wanted to ship them at factory rates. Friends who bought
Volvos got a similar deal, to return the car to the factory shipping center
for no-cost shipping. I don't know, but I suspect that one reason for the
decrease in such programs, if there has been one, has been the number of US
assembly plants; Icelandic probably doesn't run charter flights to South
Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, or the other places where they build so many of
the foreign cars these days. But I don't know. I have heard that several
companies run their ships loaded both ways, selling South Carolina-built
Eurocars in Europe, but that may be just another of those stories. I don't
think Fiat has a plant here, except for the tractors, but GM has several
places they could build Alfas.

John H.
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