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Chevy Bolt from Waterbury
Friday, May 28 2021
Today Gretchen and I would be driving to Waterbury, Connecticut to pick up a 2017 Chevy Bolt we were buying to replace or Nissan Leaf. The Leaf was great for getting around Ulster County, but we're going to need greater range to make it to the new cabin in the Adirondacks and Powerful will be taking our Prius away to Albany. Our destination was a Chevy dealership called Blasius, and Gretchen had arranged everything beforehand, including the price (about $14,000, which is very good for a Bolt of this age). We always pay cash for vehicles (since anything else is the kind of poor man's game that keep the poor from improving their plight), but because of some sort of discount we would be financing this car (and then immediately paying off the balance). Blasius would be handling a lot of the details of the transaction, including having our insurer add the Bolt to our insurance plan. We got a call from the Blasius people on the road so Gretchen could provide details of the insurance. As always, the plan was to only get liability insurance (since another thing we always do is to never buy insurance for any expenses we can easily cover from our liquid assets). But it turns out that when you finance a car, you always have to have the kind of insurance that pays for damage to your own car, so we'd have to get that briefly along with the stupid financing they're hoping we won't pay off.
I don't have a lot of experience inside car dealerships; the only other time we went into one to buy a car was back in late 2005 when we bought a brand new Prius (only to realize it was a bad use of our money and sell it a month later). Inside Blasius, we entered a kind of cubicle farm where clean-cut guys were eating their lunch at their desks and trying to look busy. (Gretchen later remarked on how obvious it was that none of these employees had enough to do to fill their days.) Our salesman was David, a guy whose eyebrows freaked Gretchen out by how far into the recesses of his eyeholes they intruded. After some last-minute dealing with the insurance mess, David went off to fetch our car. When he'd left us alone, Gretchen remarked to me on how mainstream everyone around us was. I should mention that almost nobody in the dealership was wearing masks (though the signs were all insistent that masks be worn). We were wearing masks either; perhaps everyone there had been vaccinated. And it didn't matter to us; our vaccination had made masks no longer matter.
Our Bolt was shiny and black and somewhat smaller than the Nissan Leaf. It looked to be in good shape, though it lacked a spare tire or anything to deal with a flat tire. As we poked around and looked at the various features, Gretchen opened the glove compartment and discovered some troubling documentation. Evidently the car had been in an accident that had required more than $3000 worth of repairs, mostly to the frontend. The bumper and headlights had been replaced, as had some of the air conditioning system. We'd been told the car had never had an accident, and now suddenly we felt like we were being gaslit. I opened the hood to see if there were any weird asymmetries where bent structural members hadn't been completely corrected. There's never any telling what issues one will have to deal with after a vehicle has suffered a collision. When David next appeared, Gretchen waved the document at him and asked what it was all about. David claimed ignorance, saying no claim had ever been made with an insurer, and so Blasius had no record of any collision. Nobody had checked the glove compartment, so nobody had become aware of the collision recorded in the document Gretchen had found. Evidently the accident it documented had been handled without insurance by the Bolt's previous owner, who was actually a leasee. For a repair of that relatively-small scale, it would've been to the leasee's benefit to fix the car on the sly so as not to get charged for damage when returning the car at the end of the lease. David said he could understand our concern with this revelation, and even offered that usually an accident of this nature would result in a $1000 discount on the price. He said he'd go off to see what could be done. When he was gone, Gretchen and I agreed that the car looked to be in good shape and if we could get $1000 off the price, so much the better.
When David came out again, he was with the sales manager, who pointed out that the damage recorded on the document Gretchen had found was minor and that it's not the kind of thing that would affect the car's price. He said that honestly nobody in the dealership had known about it, because if they had, it wouldn't've been there for us to find. He also pointed out that the price we were getting for the Bolt (arranged a month ago) was a very good one, and that if they were selling it now (given the ongoing inflation of used car prices), they would be asking much more for it. So the quoted the price was still on, and we could take it or leave it. So we decided to take the car for a test drive to see how it drove.
I drove it first, and was immediately struck by how responsive the Bolt was to the pressing of the "gas pedal." I'd been impressed with the rapid acceleration the Nissan Leaf had from stopped, but that sort of acceleration dwindled away the faster the Leaf went. With the Bolt, on the other hand, that sort of acceleration seemed to be available when going any speed. I've generally only drive dowdy old cars with chronic mechanical problems, so for me this isn't much of a declaration, but I'll make it anyway: I've never before driven such a zippy car in my life. I was liking the Chevy Bolt. In the parking lot of a Cosco, Gretchen swapped with me and drove, and she also liked how the car felt. There a few things not to like about it; for example, the interior felt cheap and flimsy when doing things like adjusting the rearview mirror. But that might've reflected measures to keep the car's weight down, which would contribute to its overall responsiveness.
We returned to Blasius and told David we were still on for buying the car at the pre-arranged price. So he sent us over to his guy in the financing department (who, like David, was left handed), and there Gretchen filled out several forms, including one that appeared to be a single sheet measuring a yard in length. And that was it, now we had our Chevy Bolt and the only money we'd paid so far was a $250 deposit Gretchen had made days (or weeks) ago.
On our convoy back to Hurley, I drove the Bolt and Gretchen drove the Prius. Unlike when we got the Leaf, there would be no need to charge our new car anywhere on the way home, since its range easily allowed a drive home from Waterbury. Unfortunately my cellphone (which has been getting steadily more decripit with each passing month) was utterly failing to load Google Maps via its cellular data plan. So I was forced to follow Gretchen visually in order to get to the lunch spot she'd researched, Foundry Kitchen and Tavern in Newtown, CT. (Newton, coincidentally, was the site of the infamous Sandy Hook elementary school shooting that Alex Jones said was an elaborate theatre performance to produce the political will to do something about an American gun pathology Jones find perfectly acceptable.) Foundry is not a vegan restaurant, but it has a number of compelling comfort-food purpose-built vegan options on the menu (that is, these dishes were designed from the ground up to be vegan and are not simply veganized by the removal of several ingredeients). We arrived already knowing what we wanted. Since the outdoor dining area had a half-hour wait, we dined in the dining room, where we were the only diners for much of our lunch. Gretchen got us started with the buffalo tofu and ordered the Impossible Burger patty melt for herself, while I got the mushroom po'boy. Both came with lots of shoestring french fries. I also ordered an IPA that proved excellent. The buffalo tofu might've been the best thing we ordered, as it somehow seemed to melt in the mouth. But the sandwiches were also amazing; there was a lot of food and somehow I ate all of mine (aside from the two bites I grudgingly let Gretchen take from my po'boy). We'd go to the Foundry all the time if it were nearby.
It rained for most of the drive back to Hurley, causing pockets of slow-moving traffic all the way home. Another complication was that there was no EZ-Pass in the Bolt, and all the human-staffed toll booths in Ulster County have been removed. I don't know what the consequence of driving on the Thruway with no EZ Pass and temporary plates are, but we'll probably find out.
Meanwhile, I'd told my co-workers that I'd be checking in on my phone to see if there were any Taxinator issues with a municipal tax that needed to be built today. Nothing had been happening at lunch, and I was too busy driving after that to check my phone. But back at the house, I found my boss Alex had had a minor freakout about being unable to reach me. He'd left messages in Teams and on our landline, the latter of which was snotty enough for Gretchen to comment on. But in the end it turned out the municipality wasn't sure about some of their own numbers and wouldn't be having their taxes built until after Memorial Day, so crisis, such as it was, averted.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?210528 feedback
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