Ericc B
Well-Known Member
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Yesterday another new pony set foot on the old continent. This is my story.
Having been a 20 year Mustang hobby car owner the announcement of the new 2015 finally being officially brought to our continent was something that grabbed my attention from very early on. I remember hanging out on the M6G forum all day long on that fine December day in 2013 when the car was premiered at various locations around the globe. Being a fanacital yellow car driver since 1991 (8 and counting) the first thing I did when the Sienna Miller photoset came out was photoshop the side profile pic to yellow, to at least have something to get me through what (knowing Ford) was going to be a longgggg wait.
At the time I had already booked a vacation to the US for April 2014 with a scheduled visit to New York on the 17th as I had a feeling that Ford would be doing āsomethingā there to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1964 World Fair introduction. Boy was I happy when I heard about the Empire State Building stunt and even more when I found out it was going to be a yellow convertible! Even though getting there early we had to stand in line for hours but seeing it up there in the flesh for the very first time was an amazing experience.
Two days later I was strolling around the Charlotte Motor Speedway at the MCA celebration with some old friends, sucking in some more live imagary of the black GT and Wimbledon White anniversary cars that were on display there. After having seen it in the flesh there was no doubt in my mind that my A5ās days were numbered and it would be replaced by this awesome new car, as soon as Ford would bring it ashore over here. The next 8 months crawled by with intense slowness, seeing all these happy US owners getting theirs and anxiously waiting for that day in January 2015 when the European order books would finally open. I even watched an entire soccer match to catch Ford Europeās promotion stunt surrounding the UEFA Cup final. And mind you I hate soccer.
Luckily various European Mustang anniversary shows in Cologne, Zandvoort and Brussels provided the opportunity to see it in real life again. I remember sitting next to it at the Brussels show for at least an hour, leaving a massive puddle of drool. This demo car was the same Race Red color as the Sienna Miller car, so some photoshop trickery needed to be applied again to create a new desktop wallpaper.
Eventually 2015 arrived and the order books were finally opened. Itās hard to describe the shock I felt when the CO2 specifications for the EU cars were revealed. My country imposes a massive taxation on anything on wheels that outputs more than 110 grams of CO2, so getting a GT was out of the question up front and I had prepared myself for having to pay through the nose for an EcoBoost. But the insane difference in emissions between the EcoBoost manual and automatic made my heart sink; a 46 gram difference meant an automatic would end up costing $25.000 more than a manual, getting the price up to almost $75.000. No way I am ever going to pay that amount of money for a $30.000 car. I did go over to see my local dealer, who obviously tried to convince me of getting a manual instead, but I told them after 20 years of being a happy automatic driver Iād never go back to something as primitive as that.
For months I tried to convince myself that I would regret getting a manual and that because of our stupid tax system the new Mustang simply wasnāt meant to be for me. I considered anything from a cheap no worries econobox to a new 4 Series coupe, even extensively test drove the latter, but after parking it back at the dealership and looking at it it just made me sick to my stomach.
So after 6 months of contemplating alternatives I came to my senses and realized that buying anything other than the new Mustang would be a massive cock up and that I just had to let go of my manual aversion. On July 1st I headed back tot he local dealership and negotiated a deal for a Triple Yellow EcoBoost manual. From that day all was well again in my head. Well except of course for the waiting jitters involved with getting a VIN and a build date, seeing that window sticker mockup for the first time, knowing today is the day they are going to build it and endlessly emailing Deysha to get any updates about it leaving the factory and arriving in Baltimore to be shipped. Iām sure many of you know Iām talking about.
For us non-US customers the total intransparancy of what vehicle carrier it will be shipped on is an additional nightmare. Luckily my Ford salesman was as looking forward to getting the car as I was, so he frequently inquired with Ford Netherlands and eventually found out it would be on the Eurasian Highway, leaving out of Baltimore on October 19th. For the next 14 days vesselfinder.com was my friend.
Unfortunately the logistics information after it having been unloaded in Zeebrugge was as foggy as during the months it spent on the US side of the pond. Another 5 weeks of complete darkness went by without knowing where it was until a fine Friday morning late November when I got an email from my salesman with just a coffee icon and one picture attached:
The next few minutes I set a new speed record traveling between my office and the dealership so I could finally experience that happy feeling of getting inside for the first time and breathing the unbeatable smell of new plastics and leather.
Now if you would think my days of torture were finally over, think again! Car value depriciating over here is largely determined by year of registration instead of model year or even month of production. In other words, the exact same new car registered in December of any year is worth considerably less than the same car registered one month later in January of the next. In my case the difference comes down to around $3500. So even before it arrived I had already decided to not take delivery right away and wait another month. Heck I had been waiting for over 2 years now, so whatās another few weeks. In the meantime the car was safely kept in the dealers dungeon.
Well it turned out to be the slowest December of my life, but here we are. Picked her up yesterday, the very first :first: Triple Yellow S550 on the road here in The Netherlands. And sheās all mine
Having been a 20 year Mustang hobby car owner the announcement of the new 2015 finally being officially brought to our continent was something that grabbed my attention from very early on. I remember hanging out on the M6G forum all day long on that fine December day in 2013 when the car was premiered at various locations around the globe. Being a fanacital yellow car driver since 1991 (8 and counting) the first thing I did when the Sienna Miller photoset came out was photoshop the side profile pic to yellow, to at least have something to get me through what (knowing Ford) was going to be a longgggg wait.
At the time I had already booked a vacation to the US for April 2014 with a scheduled visit to New York on the 17th as I had a feeling that Ford would be doing āsomethingā there to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1964 World Fair introduction. Boy was I happy when I heard about the Empire State Building stunt and even more when I found out it was going to be a yellow convertible! Even though getting there early we had to stand in line for hours but seeing it up there in the flesh for the very first time was an amazing experience.
Two days later I was strolling around the Charlotte Motor Speedway at the MCA celebration with some old friends, sucking in some more live imagary of the black GT and Wimbledon White anniversary cars that were on display there. After having seen it in the flesh there was no doubt in my mind that my A5ās days were numbered and it would be replaced by this awesome new car, as soon as Ford would bring it ashore over here. The next 8 months crawled by with intense slowness, seeing all these happy US owners getting theirs and anxiously waiting for that day in January 2015 when the European order books would finally open. I even watched an entire soccer match to catch Ford Europeās promotion stunt surrounding the UEFA Cup final. And mind you I hate soccer.
Luckily various European Mustang anniversary shows in Cologne, Zandvoort and Brussels provided the opportunity to see it in real life again. I remember sitting next to it at the Brussels show for at least an hour, leaving a massive puddle of drool. This demo car was the same Race Red color as the Sienna Miller car, so some photoshop trickery needed to be applied again to create a new desktop wallpaper.
Eventually 2015 arrived and the order books were finally opened. Itās hard to describe the shock I felt when the CO2 specifications for the EU cars were revealed. My country imposes a massive taxation on anything on wheels that outputs more than 110 grams of CO2, so getting a GT was out of the question up front and I had prepared myself for having to pay through the nose for an EcoBoost. But the insane difference in emissions between the EcoBoost manual and automatic made my heart sink; a 46 gram difference meant an automatic would end up costing $25.000 more than a manual, getting the price up to almost $75.000. No way I am ever going to pay that amount of money for a $30.000 car. I did go over to see my local dealer, who obviously tried to convince me of getting a manual instead, but I told them after 20 years of being a happy automatic driver Iād never go back to something as primitive as that.
For months I tried to convince myself that I would regret getting a manual and that because of our stupid tax system the new Mustang simply wasnāt meant to be for me. I considered anything from a cheap no worries econobox to a new 4 Series coupe, even extensively test drove the latter, but after parking it back at the dealership and looking at it it just made me sick to my stomach.
So after 6 months of contemplating alternatives I came to my senses and realized that buying anything other than the new Mustang would be a massive cock up and that I just had to let go of my manual aversion. On July 1st I headed back tot he local dealership and negotiated a deal for a Triple Yellow EcoBoost manual. From that day all was well again in my head. Well except of course for the waiting jitters involved with getting a VIN and a build date, seeing that window sticker mockup for the first time, knowing today is the day they are going to build it and endlessly emailing Deysha to get any updates about it leaving the factory and arriving in Baltimore to be shipped. Iām sure many of you know Iām talking about.
For us non-US customers the total intransparancy of what vehicle carrier it will be shipped on is an additional nightmare. Luckily my Ford salesman was as looking forward to getting the car as I was, so he frequently inquired with Ford Netherlands and eventually found out it would be on the Eurasian Highway, leaving out of Baltimore on October 19th. For the next 14 days vesselfinder.com was my friend.
Unfortunately the logistics information after it having been unloaded in Zeebrugge was as foggy as during the months it spent on the US side of the pond. Another 5 weeks of complete darkness went by without knowing where it was until a fine Friday morning late November when I got an email from my salesman with just a coffee icon and one picture attached:
The next few minutes I set a new speed record traveling between my office and the dealership so I could finally experience that happy feeling of getting inside for the first time and breathing the unbeatable smell of new plastics and leather.
Now if you would think my days of torture were finally over, think again! Car value depriciating over here is largely determined by year of registration instead of model year or even month of production. In other words, the exact same new car registered in December of any year is worth considerably less than the same car registered one month later in January of the next. In my case the difference comes down to around $3500. So even before it arrived I had already decided to not take delivery right away and wait another month. Heck I had been waiting for over 2 years now, so whatās another few weeks. In the meantime the car was safely kept in the dealers dungeon.
Well it turned out to be the slowest December of my life, but here we are. Picked her up yesterday, the very first :first: Triple Yellow S550 on the road here in The Netherlands. And sheās all mine
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