If you follow my blog — and you know you should — you also know that I’ve been writing about cars a lot lately. It’s because I have mastered stretching the car buying process for as long as a year. Between research, taking delivery overseas and waiting for the car to be shipped home, that’s how long it can take me.
While that may seem like waterboarding to those of you who just buy one off the lot, and thank God that’s over!, I actually enjoy the elongated process because I learn so much more about the car that way. Plus, I can wait for the best price and, most importantly, making the process excruciatingly long means I’ll never become an impulse car buyer.
By the time we took delivery of Tricia’s new XC60, I’d learned that the car’s engine is made in a Ford plant in Wales, the transmission comes from Japan and the steel body parts are stamped at Torslanda, Sweden (pronounced in English, I think, like “tush-lander”). These and other useless bits of information plus a cover-to-cover reading of the online owner’s manual really do help cement the decision to buy a car.
For me, cars cost so much — and you keep them for so long — that it’s almost inexcusable to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a car that you haven’t become an expert on. After all, you can keep some cars almost as long as you keep your children. (I do realize how unfortunate that simile is, I really do. You try coming up with clever analogies. Post your alternatives as a comment and we’ll see which one(s) are more apt than the one I came up with.)
Anyway, Volvo has been doing overseas delivery for a long time. Long enough that in the distant fog of non-Internet time they felt it would be a good customer service idea to send a letter to a buyer letting him or her know when the car shipped from Europe and when it might arrive at the local dealer.
I received such a letter this morning. (Interesting, it came via email, so this customer service process has been updated somewhat for the Internet age.) You can see a redacted copy of the letter by clicking on the link at the end of this post.
Why is this old school? Well, for one thing Volvo generated a letter, not an email. That makes me think Volvo used to actually snail mail these out. I almost wish I’d gotten a letter postmarked Tushlander, Sweden. The footer is pretty interesting, too, eh? C’mon, how often have you gotten a letter from a car manufacturer with the bank wiring instructions for different currencies in the footer? Quaint.
But a letter like this is old school because it’s outdated. There are bazillion ways to track your car minute by minute as it crosses the ocean. For one, the shipper will give you a status update on its website, using your VIN as a tracking number. After all, if UPS can tell you where that package of gum is, why can’t a logistics company tell you where a freakin’ car is just as easily?
But the ne plus ultra of tracking is the many sites that combine cargo ship satellite transponders with Google Maps to give you the minute-by-minute location of a cargo ship. For example, the Platinum Ray, which has Tricia’s car on it, is in Southhampton in the UK at the moment. That’s its last stop in Europe on this voyage before it travels to Newark; Baltimore; Brunswick, GA and Charleston, SC on this side of the pond. By the time you read this, it may be on a completely different voyage. Still, you ought to check out this link, then click on “current vessel’s track” to see how precisely where this ship is. You may think me odd or impossibly geeky, but this is just too cool for words. I’m sorry; this is the balls.
But even though I can run technological rings around Volvo’s letter with up-to-the-minute news of where Tricia’s car is as it makes its way to her, I am even more impressed with the letter. It’s a nice touch, trying to keep the customer in the loop, not assuming the customer is technologically equipped to find the ship’s callsign and input it into a tracking site.
It may be old school, but it’s cool, too.
Greetings from Gothenburg, Sweden.
I’m writing this as Tricia catches a nap – she’s a little jet lagged. How jet-lagged? Well, she fell asleep in a tram while touring a car factory today. A very LOUD car factory. That, my friends, is jet-lag.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
It took us longer than we expected to get to Gothenburg. That’s because Tricia’s friendly travel agent (me) decided not to risk a short layover in Copenhagen. That added four hours sitting in an airport to the trip time. We arrived yesterday in a blinding, driven rain to discover that southern Sweden looks like (wait for it)…Portland, ME. Of course, we didn’t see much of the terrain because we arrived at about 1pm and it was already dark. OK, so I am exaggerating…but only a little.
In December, lights out is at about 3:30pm. And sunrise is about 8:15am. So, it’s a short day. However, today the rain ended and the sun came out. It was clear, brisk and cold – again, it was a lot like a nice winter day at home.
We got up early – for the first time in travel memory, I showered first so Tricia could sleep in another 30 minutes – had breakfast next to some Swedes complaining (in English, which everyone seems to speak) about their wives, their mothers-in-law, their teenage daughters– in fact just about everyone who’s female – and then were driven to the Volvo plant.
Before we get to the good stuff a word about Swedes: they’re tall (though not as tall as Finns, I think), many of them are blond and, among younger women, those that aren’t naturally blonde seem very much to want to be blonde, so there’s a plethora of platinum blondes walking around – something I suspect those practical Swedes think is useful. Is it that blonde hair reflecting more scarce light at night is desirable in a country with nearly perpetual darkness? Are blondes preferred so those guys from breakfast can find their women in the dark more easily? BTW, did I mention it gets dark early here?
[Update: Over dinner, Tricia mentioned that a woman sitting near us might be wearing a blonde wig. Later, we went for a walk, where, I kid you not, we saw these long, stringy blonde wigs for sale in the city's megamall. I can't believe the blonde envy thing going on here. Click the thumbnail to see these platinum fantasies full-size.]
Back to the narrative. Pelle from Volvo greeted us at precisely 8:15am and presented Tricia her car. The car is quite nice – and I breathed a sigh of relief after seeing the interior. We ordered, sight unseen, an interior that isn’t available on cars that dealers import into the US. I did it for two reasons. I couldn’t stand how monotone the US interiors are and it makes Tricia’s car a unique souvenir of this trip.
Tricia got to drive the car on the delivery center’s “test track,” which was a muddy stretch of earth about 700m in length. Volvo takes it history seriously — they claim one of the reasons the company was started in the 1920′s was to build cars that could take what were at the time poor paved roads in this country. So I suspect that even though highways here today are better than at home, this “test track” was built to demonstrate the spirit of the original Volvos.
After the test drive, we visited the Volvo Museum. There were some nice P1800′s in the collection. But what stood out is how the company’s history — and the depth of its collection — stops abruptly at about the year 2000. Why? It’s obvious — the company was nearly dead when Ford bought it in 1999 and today it’s the first major Western brand to be owned by a Chinese company nobody in the occident has ever heard of. As a monument to Swedish industrial prowess, the museum just couldn’t find a way to integrate its current history into the exhibition. I really looked hard for something that hinted at the company’s last 20 years; in fact I searched the entire museum. I found one reference to Ford (on a time line that stopped in 1999) and none — nothing at all — about Geely. The visit turned out to be a fascinating lesson in the power of museum curators.
Back to the delivery center for lunch — Swedish meatballs…surprised? — and then to the sleepy-time factory tour. I was disappointed because the stamping shop was idle. I wanted to Tricia to experience the earth-shaking pounding of floor-to-second-story metal presses stamping out car body parts. It’s my favorite part of a car factory tour because it’s the ultimate metaphor for a pounding headache — and the worst, I repeat worst, industrial job one could have. My heart goes out to people working in car stamping plants.
Anyway, Tricia must have known she got the quiet version of the tour and promptly fell asleep just as the Volvo tour guide got excited describing the marriage of body and powertrain. This was my second car factory tour and in the first one the tour guide was also hopped up over this “marriage” process.
I guess you just have to be there. But I don’t get why it’s so cool. It’s just another step in producing the car. In Volvo’s case, it’s done by robots; in the BMW plant I was in, it was being done by two mädchen who, at the time, looked marriageable. I assumed that in BMW plants, only young single women performed this task, so that’s why it is called ”marriage.” However, it appears to be an industry term — and those Swedes have ruined the metaphor for me by using (German) robots.
After the tour, we came back to the hotel, where I sat in Tricia’s car until it got too cold (and dark. Have I mentioned that it gets dark early in December in Sweden?) reading the 400-plus page owner’s manual.
Tricia went to our room for a nap…and I as write this, she’s happily catching up on her sleep, counting white Volvos in her sleep.
BTW, here’s a little video of stills from our day. Looks like we had fun, doesn’t it? We sure did.
Having done both BMW and Volvo deliveries in Europe, I gotta say that Volvo’s program is better, with two exceptions. First, they gotta replace their US travel agent. Second, I’d trade the two free map updates in the US for a pre-load of Scandinavian maps when the car is delivered. I brought an old GPS I’d loaded with Scandinavian maps (you really need it), but using an add-on GPSs in a new car cheapens the experience.
Biggest, most pleasant surprise? Volvo delivers the car with a full tank of gas, something that costs a small fortune with petrol costing about 14kr/liter.
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