April 2001

Via Manchester airport, Franfurt for a 2 hour wait, and we are met at Bremen by a prebooked driver holding up our name on a large piece of paper

About 20 minutes to the downtown Marriott, where we are provided with a pleasant room and vouchers for dinner - the vouchers are a set meal which is a bit boring and does not include a drink ! The Marriott staff are helpful and the environment typical of American style hotels

The a la carte menu looks promising but the execution leaves much to be desired - we made up with copious helpings of red wine

Surprised to find that German credit card transactions are by Euro, but cash is dmark

0830 the following morning we are collected by a chatty driver and taken to the Kundecentre

We log in and meet the lady who provides umpteen bits of paper to sign

There is the final act of purchase, a passport identification, insurance, acknowledge receipt of the telephone, customs papers, import papers etc etc. Painless but somewhat long winded. The lady also assigns you a 5 day number plate and appoints the time at which you will actually collect the car

We then join 6 others for a factory tour. By bus to the first unit where body shells are assembled by robot

Just over 1400 robots produce about 400 car shells a day. This unit is fully mechanised. No people are evident.

Eye protection is worn against the continuous sparks flying into the overhead gallery

Every shell is marginally different and this is obvious to the keen eye - an odd right hand drive, the soft top etc.

From here the shell is painted in a verboten unit and moved to final assembly. We watched SLKs being completed.

The assembly is entirely manual, even each wiring loom is custom built to the car's order data

We were all intrigued by the utter dependence on human skill to fit the right colour items let alone the detailed electrical bits

We saw some QA stuff at the line end - water sprays and noise monitoring and so on

Some cars were going out on the test track but we missed the already legendary SLQ

Then back to the Kundecentre for the actual collection - the other 6 folk watched a short movie and we had coffee while watching for the CLK to appear in the show room (we knew the number plate from the paperwork lady - so identification was easy even when there were several Cabriolets) Here a pleasant technician discovered the soft-top boot cover was easy to remove and pulled it off ! He disappeared with the car for a few minutes and all was well We got to fill the phone with a SIMM card and load the navigation with an english CD

Our technician loaded our first day destination into the GPS navigation - we brought english speaking CDs from the UK along with the SIMM card which was already opened for european usage

The boot fitted CD player was loaded with 6 discs, the roof lowered and instruction given on the two items new to us - the speed limiter and tow away protection

The technician then cautioned us to avoid racing - this was defined as not more than 120mph for the first 600 miles!!

We drove out of the showroom and loaded our baggage then promptly took a wrong turning back into the factory!

And now a list of hotels