My Arctic Blue BoltEV Premier arrived at the local Chevy dealership some time late Thursday evening, along with one other (a white LT). I should be grateful I suppose for the offbeat hour. Had the carrier not arrived in the virtual dead of night, I could hardly have stopped myself from scampering over to witness the moment. The last week or so has been that way.
On Friday morning, Larry the sales manager invited me to come by after lunch. They'd be finished with dealer preparation by then, he assured me. I pretended to busy myself with other things all morning.
They weren't quite done with the prep work when I turned up at the appointed hour. It must have been obvious the suggestion that maybe I could come back a bit later wasn't going to cut much ice. A really long face can work wonders sometimes. I was led around the back by Alonzo, the salesperson.
Turns out the car was just getting a bit of a scrub down by these jolly gentlemen. I could wait for that. In fact it was damned entertaining watching them soaping and spraying. It was the first Bolt they'd seen, too. And it was mine, all mine!
Not quite yet. First, a test drive. Then the paperwork.
The briefing I received on the car was quite impressive. Both the Larry and Alonzo seemed to have read up on the Bolt (and it can only help that it shares a number of features with the Volt). Alonzo drove it off the lot. More instructions. The shifter, the display, the regeneration lever.
"Whoa, is all of this going to be on the final exam?" I felt like asking. I didn't. This stuff was important, I could tell. (I think he also wanted to drive the car.) A couple of blocks later he pulled into a parking lot and we switched.
Piece of cake, more or less. I started out driving with the shifter in the "D" position (I refuse to call it a "gear" as Chevy does in the manual). Except for the very pleasing EV torque, the Bolt drove like, well, a regular car. A regular car with a very funny instrument display.
Alonzo didn't seem to mind letting me take a fairly long and varied test drive. Out on the freeway for a bit. Then, "do you mind if I drive to my house? It's only a few miles." I asked, assuming he'd makes some excuse about being expected back sooner than that. No, that was fine. I think he was enjoying the test drive as much as I was.
I pulled into the driveway. My wife came out to have a look. She liked it right away. Okay, I guess that means I am buying it.
Another big ask of Alonzo: do you mind if I pull the car into the garage to test out my new EVSE? No, sure go ahead. And so we did (it works, by the way). As test drives go, this one was quality.
When we returned Larry wondered if we'd gone to Vegas. I think that's probably a standard car dealer in-joke about a test drive that went on just a little too long.
Nothing is quite so boring as paperwork, so I won't bore you with it. Suffice to say it was a cash deal at MSRP that involved about an hour of signing and initialing. You know the drill.
Rainy days in Southern California, how often do they happen, especially lately? So that's when it started. It was also getting dark. Wipers... defogger... where the heck did they hide that stuff? Alonzo was following me home in my old Mini. He was sure he'd know the way even if we got separated. I preferred not to risk it, if only because it was sort of late and I was sort of tired. He stayed right with me.
By this point I was getting pretty handy driving the Bolt in the "L" setting. Without a lot practice I found it fairly easy to come to a full stop without braking. This, I really like. It's a useful driving skill you can hone, like downshifting a manual.
I drove him back to the dealership, where Larry took my picture with the Bolt. I assume they do this for every customer. But this was their first one off the lot, so maybe they were almost as excited as I was. They are going to post it on their Facebook page, I think.
Back home, we decided to eat dinner out, either to celebrate or because we hadn't planned anything to cook. This is where I flunked Alonzo's test.
No, nothing car-shattering. Only when we got out of the Bolt at the restaurant, I could not for the life of me figure out why the headlights would not turn off. Are they on a timer, or some whatsis?
You can lock this car. You can walk away. But if you haven't pushed the Power button, the car thinks you are still in it. Or something. Doh. What is this, like Windows, where you have to Start Up to Shut Down? More or less.
I'm going to call that a design flaw, just because I felt so stupid for not getting it, even though I'd done it several time already that day. So maybe this car requires a bit of mental retraining, after 40-plus years of doing things another way. Probably so.
In the meantime, the charger is humming away in our garage. Another road trip in planned for tomorrow (weather permitting), when no doubt some more newer tricks will be learned by an older dog.
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