Returning to the electric vehicle life

A few years ago, I lived in California and had a friend who had a Chevy Volt. I was fascinated by the idea that I could have a car that didn’t require gas (and also by the privileges that California gives to electric vehicles, including access to HOV lanes). I couldn’t get a charger at my apartment, so I ditched the idea until a few years later, when I needed a car and coincidentally found that GM had really attractive lease deals on the Chevy Volt. I leased one, drove it for three years, and loved nearly everything about it.

Fast forward to now. The Volt is gone, I needed a car again, and saw that Chevy was again offering very attractive incentives on the Bolt. The Bolt is a pure electric vehicle; unlike the Volt, it doesn’t have a gas motor at all. On a full charge, it can go as far as 259mi, which is farther than I intend to drive (if I need to go more than 100mi or so in any direction, it’ll be in the plane!)

The Bolt comes in two trim levels: LT and Premier. There are only a handful of options; the two that I was insistent on were DC fast charging and the fancier stereo system. I was mostly agnostic on color. A little poking around on Chevy’s website showed a ton of potential vehicles, but I wanted to minimize the amount of hassle in the shopping process. Here’s what I did:

1. For each of the nearby dealers I found on Chevy’s website, I found their “contact me” link (most of which use a common GM-provided customer management system) and sent some variation on the following note:

Here’s what I’m looking for:

* 2020 or 2021 Bolt Premier
* MUST HAVE: Infotainment package, DCFC
* MUST NOT HAVE: black exterior
* DON’T CARE: interior color, Driver Confidence II

Financing will be a 3-year 15K mile/year lease with the Costco incentive. This is not a trade-in. Send me your best offer and whoever makes the best deal by September 30 gets the sale.

2. Weeded out the dealers who didn’t sell Bolts
3. Weeded out the dealers who couldn’t read or understand English and said things like “Hey, I see you wanted a Bolt– did you know about the great incentives we have right now on Silverados?”
4. Sorted the results by price.

The two clear winners were Freeland Chevrolet and Donohoo Chevrolet. (Bonus negative mention of Rick Hendrick Chevrolet, which wrote me a $600/month lease offer on the car– including an oil-change service package and mandatory $199 nitrogen in the tires. No thanks.)

After doing a little more thinking about what I wanted to use the car for, I went back to the top three dealers and asked them to run the numbers for a purchase. Donohoo was the clear winner here. The car they quoted me had an MSRP of $43,735 from Chevy’s build-and-price page. Donohoo priced it at $37, 235. Costco members get $3,000 off purchase or lease of a wide range of GM vehicles, and Chevy itself has an $8,500 purchase incentive– so with a $1500 down payment, that brought my price out the door to $25,573.

I chose to finance through Redstone Federal Credit Union. In retrospect, this wasn’t a great choice because they were super slow. It took more than two weeks to close the loan and get a check to the dealer. As one example of their general slowness, they sent the check on a Friday using UPS Next-Day Saver, which meant the check went from Huntsville to Montgomery to Fort Payne, so it wasn’t delivered until Tuesday. Great job, guys.

So that’s the car. One final note: I paid Donohoo extra to deliver the car, and they did a great job: the car showed up as promised, with a chase vehicle to drive the driver back to Ft. Payne. It was well worth the $175 delivery charge to not have to drive down there to get it.

Because it’s an electric car, of course I needed a way to charge it. Chevy ships a “Level 1” 120-volt charger than can provide 12 Amps (12A) charging. That’s enough to add about 4 miles of range per hour… which isn’t a lot. Level 2 chargers require 240V outlets, so I hired Budget Electric to add a 240V outlet and bought a Clipper Creek Level 2 charger. Although the Clipper Creek unit cost just under double the cheapest unit on Amazon, it’s American-made, includes a three-year warranty, and comes from the same company that builds the charger that comes with the car. I had a Clipper Creek charger for the Volt and liked it quite a bit.

So far I’m delighted with the car: it’s quick and fun to drive, thanks to a 200hp electric traction motor and its short wheelbase. The infotainment system works flawlessly with Apple CarPlay; the only thing I haven’t tested is the DCFC charging capability. I look forward to a world when the only time I stop at a gas station is to buy Diet Coke.