Few people check the box. In fact, the salesperson readying your brand new car probably has never seen anyone choose the “European Delivery” option. But there it is, waiting for you.

Tick that box and you won’t be leaving the fancy dealership with your car today. Instead, you’ll soon be heading to Europe for an automotive dream vacation, during which you’ll pick up your new vehicle at the factory and enjoy a European road trip paid for by the automakers.

Six car companies do this. BMW, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, Volvo, and Porsche expend major marketing effort and print a lot of glossy brochures to entice buyers to come to their factories. (Rolls-Royce doesn't, but a pricey bespoke program exists if you can afford a Rolls and know whom to ask). The automakers will send you to either Germany or Sweden, and once you pick up your new car, you're free to drive it around Europe with no bureaucratic hand-holding or restrictions. The companies throw in two weeks of European Union auto insurance for good measure.

As these programs become more well-known, more North Americans are ticking that box. Here's how to get your own European vacation.

Mercedes-Benz

2019 Mercedes-Benz C-Class Mercedes

You've got two choices of where in Germany to pick up your new Benz: Bremen, or Mercedes' hometown of Stuttgart.

The Bremen factory, which builds the SL, SLK, C-Class, E-Class Coupe, and GLK, is Mercedes' largest factory in the world. If you pick up your car there, you'll see assembly line after assembly line where a workforce of 12,500 people assembles cars. If you choose Stuttgart, you’ll get a factory tour and also a tour of the company museum in which more than 160 milestone Mercedes production vehicles, racing models, and concept cars sit. The list includes the first modern production car, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, built in 1885.

Depending on the model, Euro delivery scratches off seven percent of the car's retail price (MSRP), as well as the $925 destination fee that dealerships make you pay up front. The Euro delivery discount also stacks with most promotional offers, says Catherine Gebhardt, a Mercedes-Benz USA public relations representative.

Mercedes supplies a $200 Delta Air Lines voucher, a taxi credit, your first night's hotel in Stuttgart or Bremen, and breakfast or lunch the next morning. The bad? Mercedes excludes quite a few cars from Euro delivery, so it'd be easier to list the ones they include: the CLA Coupe, C-Class Coupe and Cabriolet, E-Class, CLS, GLA, GLC, and SL.

The company supplies free European auto insurance for two weeks after you pick up the car, after which you're on the hook for the cost. Mercedes has the most generous deadline for returning your car for shipment to the U.S. You've got up a year to do whatever you want with your Benz until you drop it off in one of eight countries (the limit is only one month if you lease through Mercedes' in-house financing). Once you drop off the car, it'll take 8 ½ to 12 ½ weeks for the vehicle to arrive at the dealership nearest to your home. Leaving it to a drop-off center outside Germany adds three weeks.

BMW

Aerial view taken on July 4, 2011 shows the headquarters and the main factory of German carmaker BMW in the southern German city of Munich. CHRISTOF STACHE Getty Images

BMW's program invites you to tour its Munich headquarters, one of the most heavily robotized car factories in the world. Here, the German automaker will deliver your new car to you on a glass elevator with plenty of pomp in the BMW Welt, an architecturally beautiful exhibition center that's part showroom, part science fair exhibit meant to show off BMW's newer models. If the sight of M1s, 507's, and Isettas gets your blood moving, then take up BMW on its offer of a private tour of the company museum, where they keep the rarest and most historically significant BMWs in the world.

Munich's hometown car company offers you 5 percent off MSRP and two free weeks of auto insurance. You can keep the car in Europe for up to five months before you have to drop it off in one of seven European countries. The deal is for three months if you finance or lease through BMW's financial service. Six to ten weeks later, your Bimmer will pass through Customs, and a week later will be waiting at your local dealership in the U.S. Add a week if you leave it outside Germany. Euro delivery doesn't apply to the X3, X4, X5, or X6, which are built in South Carolina, or to the hybrid i3.

Audi

Audi production at Neckarsulm. Audi

Pick up your car at one of two locations in Germany: Audi's headquarters in the medieval walled city of Ingolstadt or the Neckarsulm factory. You're on your own for airfare, but Audi pays for the hotel room the night before a chauffeur arrives in the morning to whisk you to the factory. If you opt for Ingolstadt, guides take you on a two-hour tour of the factory, and then you're free to take a self-guided tour of the Audi museum, which is set up chronologically with each of 15 sections covering a mini-timeline in Audi's history from 1899 to today. In Necksarsulm, you get an individualized factory tour, but no museum. If you're heading west on your European road trip, pass through the Black Forest's famous driving roads before you enter France.

You get two weeks of auto insurance from the day you pick up the car, but your stay in Europe is limited to 90 days before you have to leave the car in one of nine drop-off countries. Every model except for the Q5, SQ5, and A3 e-tron are available for the program, and every available model, save for the R8 and RS, qualifies for a 5 percent discount off sticker price. After drop-off, it takes 11 to 13 weeks for your local dealership to reunite you and your new Audi.

Volvo

Volvo test track Volvo

The only non-German automaker on the list, Volvo supplies two free round-trip tickets on Scandinavian Airlines to Volvo's headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden, and then puts you and your guest up for a night in the four-star Clarion Hotel Post before you head to the factory in the morning. Discounts vary by model, as does cancellation of the $995 destination fee. In Gothenburg, Volvo lets you test drive your new car or SUV on a demo track and then feeds you a traditional Swedish lunch. Afterward, you take a one-hour guided tour through the Volvo factory to see how your car was built, and then the 86,000-square-foot Volvo Museum that displays the whole spread of Volvo's 91-year history: road cars, race cars, concept cars, trucks, buses, boat engines, and construction equipment.

Unlike the German automakers, Volvo lets you order special Europe-only options, colors, wheels, and interiors not otherwise available for U.S.- market vehicles, although Volvo didn't respond to our inquiries to specify what they were. You've got up to six months in Europe before you have to return it to a drop-off location in one of seven countries so that Volvo can ship it home. You have to pay for the transportation from your drop-off location to the port where your car will ship out, but you can skip the fee if you return it to Gothenburg.

Porsche

Porsche Museum Porsche

Porsche is a bit of a buzzkill when it comes to fringe perks. The Stuttgart automaker offers no discount, airfare, hotel stay, or transportation to the factory. But if you're picking up a Cayenne or Panamera from the Leipzig location, you'll get to drive on the Porsche factory's test track, which is FIA sanctioned as a competition race track. Cayenne drivers also get to run through the 3.7-mile off-road obstacle course. You'll cross over fallen logs, a stepped ascent, and a seesaw, and ford a 165-foot-long stretch of water.

Pick up at the Zuffenhausen factory in a suburb of Stuttgart and you’ll get to visit the official Porsche Museum that holds many of the most historically significant Porsche road and race models in the world, including the first Porsche ever built: the P1, a wooden-wheeled electric slab built in 1898, lost in 1902, and rediscovered in a shed in 2014.

Porsche sends you off with 16 days of auto insurance, and gives you a maximum of six months in Europe before you have to send the car back via one of eight countries. There are additional charges to transport it between dropping it off and putting it on the ship, but Porsche didn't respond to inquiries to specify how much they were. It did say, in its official literature: “(After delivery), you are invited to enjoy a complimentary lunch in the executive office building and shop for exclusive merchandise at the Porsche Selection Boutique adjacent to the delivery center.” Which is very Porsche.

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