Can picking up a car from the factory where it was made be as rewarding as visiting a watch manufacturer or top winery? Darius Sanai enrolled on Mercedes Personal Collection programme in Germany to find out
Experiencing luxury goods at the place where they are made is one of the great joys of life. To see the craftsmen and the raw materials at point of origin gives you a whole new layer of insight into the object that you own. There’s nothing like sipping fine wine among the vineyards that created it, or collecting your watch from the manufacturer in Switzerland where it was assembled.
But what about cars? Even the greatest automobiles on the road are made on the kind of mass scale – of tens of thousands a year, at the very least – that suggests a visit to the factory might be an impersonal, not to mention noisy, experience. And you’re hardly encouraged to do so: the chap in the glossy showroom taking the deposit for your swanky new motor is rarely falling over himself to suggest you come and inspect working practices at the factory.
There is one exception though, and it’s a consistent one through the years. When I was young my late father once told me the story of how, in 1958, he picked up his Mercedes 190 saloon from the factory in Germany and drove it back to Tehran, Iran, where he then lived. The route took him over the Alps, through Communist eastern Europe and along the Black Sea, and while the condition of roads in Greece and Turkey in the 1950s doesn’t bear thinking about, I was always just as fascinated by the tale of ‘factory collection’. He had picked up the ivory white car, with its oxblood leather interior and ivory steering wheel, at the very point where it had been made; the Merc’s first journey, spectacular as it was, was also his first in the car.
Exactly 50 years later, an enquiry revealed that Mercedes still do a ‘factory collect’ option when buying one of their cars, and that it’s supposed to be the envy of the industry in terms of its thoroughness. Moreover they don’t restrict it, like the watch manufacturers do, to their wealthiest customers buying their most exclusive products: anyone can do it.
I had to try. But what car to choose? There is no longer a 190, which was an elegant small saloon; the company’s product range has multiplied over the years, but I wanted something special. In the end I chose an SL 63 AMG roadster, a brand-new two seater convertible that sits near the very top of the Mercedes spectrum. Figures like 0-60 mph in 4.5 seconds and an output of 525 horsepower excited the driver in me; and the striking lines satisfied the aesthete. At £102,075 (€128,000) it sounded like a true Luxmobile.
After weeks of agonisingly slow waiting, the appointed day came, and I was whisked to Bremen, northwest Germany, in Lufthansa’s highly efficient business class service. A driver (in a Mercedes, naturally) picked me up from the airport, and 10 minutes later I arrived at... at where, exactly?
The words ‘factory pick up’ had me expecting to be met by a chap with greasy hands in an overall smoking a cigarette, who’d inspect my receipt, disappear inside a side door of a thrumming factory, emerge with my car and wave me a cheery goodbye. But the Mercedes Customer Centre looked more like a museum of modern art, a vast building with glass walls, a glass-panelled atrium with escalator rising alone to a metal-and-glass mezzanine. There were no men with greasy overalls in sight, just a striking receptionist who welcomed me, took my documents, offered me coffee and then sat me down in front of a colleague. I signed a couple of pieces of paper, and was introduced to my guide for the tour of the factory.
For those expecting a car factory to be a messy place full of petrol and oil patches, it was an eye opener. Shiny floors you could eat your dinner off; wonderfully honed machines and men carefully putting together each part of a car before following it down the line to install the next bit. The engines of Mercedes’ sports division are hand-made and at one point a name-plate bearing the etched signature of ‘your’ engineer is attached to the engine. Marvellous.
On returning to the reception area I was told that my car would be ready in 45 minutes. There were many things to do to while away those minutes. Up the escalator, I discovered a fine dining restaurant with floor-to-ceiling windows offering views across the wood and north German heathland; I lunched on crab ravioli in a rocket sauce. Outside the restaurant, classic Mercedes were dotted around including a beautiful Gullwing 300 SL from the 1950s. (I took this as a good omen.) Back downstairs, past the children’s play area, I headed towards a cafeteria beyond which was what appeared to be a traditional car showroom.
Except it wasn’t. The cafeteria was actually the waiting area for those whose numbers were up next; the ‘showroom’, separated from us by floor-to-ceiling glass, was a giant garage where cars were driven in and presented to their new owners. Every minute or two a new name was called over the PA and an excited couple, or family, would go to a desk by the window, be ushered through a door, and shown the new addition to the family. It sounds strange, but it really was a bit like a maternity ward in there – minus all the pain and screaming of course.
I had just sat down and finished my espresso when I felt a vibrating beneath the floor. All eyes looked up to the garage where a striking silver rocket-like car appeared; it was this car that was making the thunderous noise. “Mr Sanai,” called the PA. This was my car.
A smiling Mercedes man handed me the keys and showed me around my new car. In the room was a podium with a leather-bound visitors’ book on it; a photographer was on hand to capture the moment. Taking delivery of what was the most expensive car there, I felt the eyes of 40 people in the waiting area on me as I pressed the button to open the metal roof, and caressed the accelerator, making this hugely powerful car (it has as much power as three regular family cars) leap forward, onto a drive, past a sign wishing me a good life with my new Mercedes, and onto the open road.
The next day, drawing up outside my home in London, I left the SL 63 to pout on the tarmac. Alas, Mercedes would collect it the next day, as it was destined to be part of their press fleet. But I brought it into the world, and that’s an experience that will remain with me forever. www.mercedes-benz.com
SL 63 AMG - THE FIRST DRIVE
Mercedes will organise your journey home down to where you dine, if you so wish. There are a number of different routes to the Channel Tunnel in Calais from Bremen; the most picturesque involve overnighting in historic towns like Amsterdam or Maastricht in Holland, Antwerp or Bruges in Belgium. I chose, instead, to stop off in Cologne, some 320 kilometres due south of Bremen, in Germany. The reason was twofold. Cologne’s crisp, flavoursome local beer, Kölsch, is in my view perhaps the finest in the world; and the city is a stopping off point for the roads of the Eifel mountains. My journey to Cologne from the factory was an uneventful autobahn cruise, but the next morning I set out early and blasted the SL along the Eifel’s twisting highways. The AMG is a massively fast car, and its seven gears mean it can cruise effortlessly in top gear at more than 160 mph (260 km/h) on the autobahns, and its brilliant suspension means you barely need to slow down for the corners. At one point it left a posse of superbikes in its wake, and it’s more than a match for a Porsche 911 Carrera S. My one criticism? It’s so well engineered that driving at insane speeds is easy – even a bit clinical. But then, you can always put the roof down to liven things up... Or buy the limited-edition SL 63 AMG IWC which comes complete with IWC Ingenieur watch in the glovebox.