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Re: IDS questions -- also long.
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Posted by Philip Tone (more from Philip Tone) on Thu, 8 Jun 2006 11:50:21 Share Post by Email
In Reply to: European delivery questions.... (long), NateinAA, Thu, 8 Jun 2006 07:11:44
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Nate,

I just got home from Germany, having done IDS in Vienna. My salesperson/dealer for this deal is Mike Lynch, who frequently posts to this site.

My delivery just barely happened, and for some reason (which I still have not understood, since Jaye Trice, who handles all IDS for the USA, insists that no one failed to do their job), the Swedish export plates and registration had not been submitted when they should have been, and in fact arrived only 3 hours before the car was delivered to me. If they had not arrived in time, Saab was prepared to pick up the tab for a rental car. That's right: I would have been able to go down to Saab in Wien and look at my car, but not be able to take delivery without the plates/reg.

The scary part here is that neither Mike nor Jaye knew about the registration/plates problem until my wife (who is German) talked to the Saab dealer in Wien (who has limited English) when we called to arrange a pickup appointment. So, it helps to have language skills of the country in which you are taking delivery, just in case an issue like mine comes up.

Otherwise, the pickup went smoothly; in fact, the dealer included a first aid kit and two orange vests without charge -- these are required by Austrian law, and not having the vests can result in a 220 euro fine. For some reason, my 2006 9-3 2.0t does not have color-matched door handles -- they are black, which is still delivered in some trim models in other countries, but supposedly not here in the USA. It makes me wonder in what other ways my car is not equipped as advertised. I am sure Mike will check that out when the car gets here; I am curious if Saab would replace the door handles free of charge.

I put exactly 1380 miles on the car in a little less than 3 weeks, mostly in Germany, but also some driving in Austria. I can only help on your questions about traveling on German roads.

First, pull over often at gas stations and clean all the dead insects from the body. If you leave this too long, it's a bitch and very time-consuming, since you don't want to rub too hard on a new car finish. Driving on many rural roads or between cities this time of year ensures that you'll have to do this often. Don't know what it's like later in the year, though.

Wash the car by hand before you drop it off, if possible. You really shouldn't use an automatic wash on a new car (as the manual recommends). The shipper expects you to clean the car, and will charge you to wash it -- with an automatic wash, of course.

Most large European cities are pretty hectic to drive in, I've found. Vienna is difficult because there are no separate street signs -- they are attached to buildings on the corners, and so small that they are nearly impossible to read for the driver. In Berlin, they have street signs, but the driving style is extremely aggressive. When turning left, once you pull into the intersection, you cannot see the main signals any more, so might have to rely on a special green arrow that appears on a separate signal once the main signal changes. Hard for me to get used to.

On rural roads: some are quite narrow, and once I thought an oncoming car was going to take my driver mirror off -- seriously. Some vehicles will not move over much, if at all.

On autobahns, you usually have two lanes on your side, and the right lane can and usually is clogged with large, slow truck traffic (except on Sundays). Sometimes, a bus or truck will overtake a slower truck, and they may be marginally faster, which means a long line of traffic stacks up in the left lane, some of whom will want to go about 120-130 miles/hour once the truck finally moves over. Don't linger in the left lane unless you intend to go faster than everyone else, which includes Porsches, for instance. The speed limit is usually 130km/hr on a lot of stretches, although a lot of people will ignore that, at their peril, especially in the old GDR, where for no apparent reason the speed limit suddenly drops to 100 km/hr. These are enforced speed traps (for example, between Berlin and Hamburg).

I encountered a couple of things I don't see here much. One, there can be roadwork on long stretches of autobahn (say, 20 km) with only one lane open and a limit of 80 km/hr. This can seriously disrupt your estimate on travel time, and there seems to be no way of knowing unless you call the German auto club ahead of time. Two, you might approach a junction from a rural road to an autobahn and find that they have denied you access, maybe. This appears on their big yellow road signs with your destination crossed out. Great. On one occasion, however, it was a lie, and the onramp was not closed after all.

Hope that helps,

Phil


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