I have ordered a car from MM and I need to decide on delivery there and driving it home >1000mi or shipping. The second choice is museum delivery. The third choice is courtesy delivery. Not all dealers do courtesy delivery and the closest one to me is 1hr away. It seems that this is for SR only which is what I ordered.

Has anyone ever done a courtesy delivery? I know I read something about that but after searching, I didn't find that post again.

 

Courtesy delivery must be determined prior to ordering. You have to set it up with the receiving dealer prior and get the dealers BAC number. The order is written up as "order" dealer and "ship to" dealer. I too looked at all of the options, but courtesy delivery is the cheapest and easiest logistically. Not all dealers are required to do it, so that has to be figured out first before order placed. I figured for me being in AZ, NCM delivery would have cost me about $4, for cost of options, airfare, hotels, food, gas, and/or shipping. Courtesy set me back $200, for a dealer prep fee. Shipping from Criswell where I bought it would have been close to $3k.

To me Courtesy is the way to go, unless you really want the NCM experience.

 

Thanks. I ordered mine from MM which is 1000 mi from Atlanta. The museum is 500mi away. I did a Porsche Experience Center delivery a few years ago, but Porsche HQ and the Experience Center is right here in Atlanta and it's literally at the east end of the airport runways. They treated me like a King and it was a highly recommended experience. But I've done it. So, I'm leaning toward courtesy delivery. It is $500 and that dealer is 1hr away. I'm much closer to large dealers like Hendrick, but I guess they don't do courtesy deliveries. I may ask them to not wash it. I'm fanatical about swirls and scratches. I have all the foam cannon cleaners and polishers from my previous car.

 

It's more MM will only do Courtesy Delivery with selected dealers. Apparently they had lots of issues in the past and even stopped offering it for a period of time. Congrats tho!

 

MM courtesy delivery is pretty straight forward, you rep will give the names of dealers near you and the contact of the point person at each dealer. I called the point person at the dealer I was going to use, i wanted to get a feel for the dealership, in my case the CD was very nice and I felt totally conferrable using them. Ultimatly I ended up ordering for another place and no MM. I would do the CD delivery over the other options if I was ordering from MM….

 

^^^^This is the info that you need to know. If there is an issue with the car, the courtesy dealer needs to handle it, not the selling dealer which in your case is MM. MM has a network of approved dealers that they have had good experiences with located around the USA. It's not just that some dealers don't do courtesy deliveries which is true, but some dealers will treat a courtesy delivery customer like a red headed stepchild. A worse case scenario with a courtesy delivery is if the car arrives off the car carrier with damage or a defect. Good Luck with that.

Your best option is to have MM ship the car to your driveway if you decide against museum delivery. This way MM does the pre-delivery inspection (PDI) and can catch any issue with the car before it ships to you. Now you may think, "How often does a car come in damaged or has a major issue?" It doesn't matter. It happens enough that if it does happen, think about how you would like it handled and how the courtesy delivery dealer would handle it. You may be looking at two different outcomes.

 

MM sent me a copy of a questionnaire that they sent to the dealer that would handle the courtesy delivery. So, I don't know if they really have a network of courtesy delivery dealers or not. It is only $500 for the service, so I do have my concerns.

Regarding damaged cars: In the old days (1970s) they came in damaged all the time. My father was General Sales Manager at a Chevy dealership for over 30yrs. I worked there as a teenager in the 70s washing cars and prepping them for delivery. In those days cars sometimes arrived in terrible condition. One was once delivered with the roof peeled off because the driver of the truck didn't lower the top deck all the way and the lead car literally struck a bridge. I think it was a Cutlass. They were also an Oldsmobile dealer.

Funny story: I arrived to work one day from school. I had just arrived and one of the men in the wash/detailing shop yelled out here comes H**** (my last name). He was referring to my dad who was clearly agitated. Everyone got super busy or disappeared except me who had just arrived. My dad called me outside to show me some grease or something on a car that he was about to deliver. Of course I was innocent, but it escalated into yelling and my dad fired me on the spot! A few days later, I had come to pick up my check and I was hanging around the service department. The franchise owner comes up to me and what are you doing? I said just came to get my check. He said why don't get that at the end of the day and I said my dad had fired me days earlier. He looks at me and said he can't fire you, get back to work.

 

Museum delivery for my C6 and C8 purchased from MM. Considered courtesy delivery for the latter but the sole dealer in Houston that MM used would only hand me the keys, no tank of gas, just dealer prep.

 

After my 20 years in the car business this how 99% of CD are done.

Remember if there are any issues be prepared to be on your own. The CD owes you nothing while your contact is hundreds to thousands of miles away.

All CD I’ve witnessed got the “3 See’s”- 1 See your car, 2 See your keys, 3 See you later.

YMMW

 

Back when I was kid in the 50s and 60s my cousins and their friends used to throw rocks at the new cars as they went past on the rail cars, They damaged quite a lot of new vehicles, broken windshields etc. They used to give me a lot of abuse because I wouldn't do it. Nowadays when I see the enclosed rail cars I figure it's my cousins' legacy...

 

Yep. Now with the mostly enclosed auto rack railroad cars, graffiti artists also have a platform. So, their legacy is even larger.