In 2014, we bought a Mercedes CLA250 with European delivery. This program means that you purchase a car through your local US dealer just as you would if you were picking it up from the dealer. We got a 5% discount on the CLA off the US price. More expensive Mercedes cars received a higher percentage discount.
Once you close the deal, you will receive notification of when your car will be ready for pick up at the factory in Sindelfingen. You plan your trip accordingly. When you arrive in Stuttgart the night before, you check into a 5 star hotel paid for by Mercedes. The next morning, you take a taxi from the hotel to the Mercedes factory paid for with a voucher provided by Mercedes. You arrive and check in. This gives you access to the part of the building where people are waiting to pick up their cars. There are complimentary snacks, coffee and soft drinks available.
If you choose, you can go on a factory tour. We did and it was very interesting. We also received a voucher for lunch at the restaurant in the building same building.
When we picked up the car, had a technical specialist run us through the vehicle operations. After you are familiarized with your car, you drive out the door. As part of the European delivery program, Mercedes covers the insurance and registration costs for a period of time. At the end of this time, you drop off the car at any of the many drop off points in Europe. These drop off points arrange the ocean shipment to the US. When your car arrives in the US, you pick it up at your local dealer.
The European delivery program may have changed in the past 4 years, but this describes what was current in 2014. After US tax and title, we paid less than the US list price would have been.
Based on a comment, let me add another anecdote from this story. I was going to add this to the original answer, but I changed my mind.
On the drive from Bavaria to Berlin, we stopped to visit friends in Ingolstadt. They had a Mercedes that was few years old. They asked how much we paid, and I told them. They looked up the price on a comparable Mercedes CLA in Germany and found that the price was higher in Euros than what we had paid in dollars. The exchange rate in June 2014 was €1.00 = $1.36. This meant that we had paid $29,000 and to have bought the same car in Germany would have cost over $35,000 after receiving a rebate for the 19% Mehrwehrtsteuer. This did not include the cost that we would have incurred shipping the car to the west coast of the US.
The current price of a CL250 on the Mercedes-benz.de website is €38,437. This is $37,694 (excluding 19% Mehrwehrtsteuer) at today's exchange rate of $1.167=€1.00. The CLA250 price on the mbusa.com website is $33,100.
The answers are all saying no. There was a period of time, I think the late 1970’s and into the 80’s that there was an economy to it. The pricing was such that US people could order a car, pick it up in Germany, drive it around, and ship it to the US for the approximate cost of buying one in the US. The same was true of other European cars as well. While this didn’t necessarily save much money, it did allow vacationers to add value to the car by offsetting some of their vacation costs. Note that those cars were spec’d for the US market with US smog and safety equipment, which is different than the European models.
During that period, the cost differential was great enough that people had what they called “grey market cars”. People would buy the European models, add on US safety and smog equipment themselves, ship the cars over, and still beat the official price for a US model. The car manufacturers and dealers were not the least bit happy about that and did their best to quash the practice. It wasn’t just German cars, either, A lot of high end European cars did the same thing. People thought it was just that Americans valued the cars and would pay more than Europeans or people in other countries, so they jacked up the prices. They marketed the cars as “exclusive” automobiles in the US market and charged a lot for them. There might have been currency differentials that helped, too.
