Sweden the Volvo Way
What a nice opportunity to get two free tickets to Europe. We just had to buy a car to get them.
That’s the Volvo experience –their overseas delivery. Buy the car stateside at a Volvo dealer, and Volvo grants you two complimentary airline tickets to fly to Sweden to “meet” your car, drive it a while, return home and await the shipment of your new car. Neat, huh? Several other luxury car dealers offer a similar experience. Our choice was Volvo. I don’t know exactly why, but we did. And here’s how it works.
Getting to know our new Volvo at the factory in Sweden.
There aren’t too many Volvo dealers in Nebraska — one to be exact and certainly not located in our little berg of 300 people. So we traveled to the urban center in Omaha, NE, met with the Volvo rep to view the cars, pick out the specs we wanted and then got ready to schedule our trip. Volvo even helped us make travel arrangements.
A few months later we were on our way to Gothenburg, Sweden which is where the Volvo factory is located. We were met at the airport and transported to a four-star hotel and treated to a sumptious dinner. The next morning we toured the factory and were given the chance to drive our new car.
The program gives you the option of traveling around Sweden for a few days in your new car as long as you stay within a certain radius of Gothenburg, which of course we did.
What a nice opportunity to get two free tickets to Europe. We just had to buy a car to get them.
That’s the Volvo experience –their overseas delivery. Buy the car stateside at a Volvo dealer, and Volvo grants you two complimentary airline tickets to fly to Sweden to “meet” your car, drive it a while, return home and await the shipment of your new car. Neat, huh? Several other luxury car dealers offer a similar experience. Our choice was Volvo. I don’t know exactly why, but we did. And here’s how it works.
Getting to know our new Volvo at the factory in Sweden.
There aren’t too many Volvo dealers in Nebraska — one to be exact and certainly not located in our little berg of 300 people. So we traveled to the urban center in Omaha, NE, met with the Volvo rep to view the cars, pick out the specs we wanted and then got ready to schedule our trip. Volvo even helped us make travel arrangements.
A few months later we were on our way to Gothenburg, Sweden which is where the Volvo factory is located. We were met at the airport and transported to a four-star hotel and treated to a sumptious dinner. The next morning we toured the factory and were given the chance to drive our new car.
The program gives you the option of traveling around Sweden for a few days in your new car as long as you stay within a certain radius of Gothenburg, which of course we did.
Sweden is a rocky country with lots of lakes and coastal islands. But numerous ferries makes the country easy to traverse.
This is our first time owning a Volvo. Some people want nothing else, and drive the car for thousands and thousands of miles. And as long as you keep buying their cars, Volvo keeps providing airline tickets to Europe. A friend of ours is on his third Volvo trip.
If there’s a downside to this car, it’s also the feature Volvo prides itself most on — safety. In fact, the Company says their technology and makeup of the car is such that in a few years they feel safe in saying no one will ever have a fatality while driving a Volvo.
But it’s the technology that has driven me a bit batty at times. In rural Nebraska we drive a lot to get where we want to go. In our case, we average about 30,000 miles a year on each vehicle. My husband prefers his pickup, so I do most of the driving of the Volvo. If I stray ever-so slightly over the center lane, Volvo notices, and if done too often the cruise control automatically goes off and a little coffee cup shows up on the dashboard telling me it’s time for a break. Thanks for looking out for me, Volvo. There are numerous other features that send off beeps and whistles to remind me of things I’m apparently not doing. I suppose I could turn off the beeps, but then I’d have to read the owner’s manual.
At the end of the day, it was worth the trip to Sweden to get a Volvo and to see that beautiful country. Will I do it again? I don’t know. With a mere 60,000 miles on the car, I can wait a while to make that decision.