A Car Story

From German social media this morning, I was browsing and this one German (from Berlin-City)....was discussing this significant problem that has occurred over the past four months.

Locals from the city....even in April, May and June....who'd ordered new cars (from various dealerships) months before.....had patiently waited....some for six months for the delivery.  So in the midst of the lockdown period, in the last bit of push-out by the manufacturing sector here in Germany.....the cars got loaded on trucks and somehow delivered.

We won't talk about essential status or non-essential status....the truckers and the crew at VW, Audi or BMW would prefer not to get into this discussion.

The dealers had the cars delivered and they contacted the buyer.

This odd thing then played out in Berlin.....the registration office in the city basically came to a complete stop.  They cited the Coronavirus, and simply went to no-visitors allowed.

In this case, a lot of the buyers had not paid the final bit on the cars, and the dealers were standing there....with a car assigned to a buyer, but no way to register it or tag it.  So the owners just gazed at the mess and stalled the process.

The anger building up?  It's mostly now against the government of the city.....led by the SPD Party, and partnered up with the Linke and Green folks.

Just in numbers alone....they are probably a month or two behind the power curve at the present point.

The buyer can't get the registration done.....the car sits in the dealers yard, with credit people hyped up and negative about cash-flow.

A bureaucratic mess?  More or less.

I sat with both my wife and son last year.....as each bought a new vehicle, and this meant a visit to the city registration office here in Wiesbaden.

From my experiences in the 1990s in Kaiserslautern, it was a harsh situation and required a ton of patience.  Any one of a dozen things in those days meant a wasted trip.  You typically had to budget a minimum of two hours of waiting before you got in....unless you went at 7:30 AM to get in line early.

But in these two visits in 2019....things had changed in a dramatic way....there was a 15-minute window that you reserved a spot and as long as you got there on time, with all the required paperwork....the two-hour wait was out.  Course, getting this appointment?  Well....it meant you needed to plan this out five days ahead of time.

This Berlin 'crisis' is simply another example of how Germans are marginally coping with reality and frustrated with the way that things now run.  For some, their new car may sit in a dealer's lot for up to six months before the tag is presented, they pay, and then remove the car from the lot.