cts | Volt a Day | Buy the Bolt March 26, 2017

This will eventually be the first entry in my new blog about having a Bolt, which is amazingly close to the perfect electric car and the vehicle that I imagined when I was driving around in the Volt. Since I don’t have the Bolt blog set up yet, I figure I’ll put this at the end of my Volt-a-Day blog, where (according to WordPress metrics) hundreds of people still come to look at the material I wrote when I was part of the Chevy Volt Customer Advisory Board and drove one of the first sixteen Volts allowed on the roads.

If this is too long a read and you came here for advice on how to buy a Chevy Bolt in the Los Angeles area I can tell you that my friend Dean had an excellent experience with Community Chevrolet in Burbank.

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This is the story of buying our Bolt. I considered it a bit of a nightmare, but perhaps I am spoiled by the last few experiences, some of which were managed by General Motors itself. You can decide.

To recap, in case you are here without knowing the author, I leased one of GM’s first electric cars, the GM EV1, way back in 1999. It was my wife’s car and she’s now been driving pure electric vehicles for 18 years. We have had, in order:

We have a deposit down on a Tesla Model 3, but I tried having a Tesla Model S in the garage for four days and the car is just too big and it’s not what I need for the short-hops I tend to do.

My wife really would like to have a car with more range than her i3, which is an amazing electric car, but which can only go about a hundred miles before it needs to be charged. She was thrilled when she first got her Rav4 Electric because she was able to go up to Ojai for the weekend to write and it made it up there without stopping for a charge.

I was excited when the Bolt was announced and then when I saw several “first drive” articles. Our friend, and my wife’s co-author, Sheryl Sandberg, interviewed Mary Barra for a Facebook Live event and it felt like new technology and new vehicles were really important to the CEO. That was good news. We waited anxiously for the Bolt to show up at local dealers.

Our closest dealer for the Volt was Bunnin Chevrolet. “Everybody’s runnin’ to Bunnin.” In the three and a third years that we had the car there was a single issue with the battery pack that they fixed, and other than that it never needed to go to the dealer.

I was at the dealer several times, since I gave friends test drives in the car and very actively tried to convert people to the serial-hybrid way of thinking. The more people driving their first city miles of the day electric the better. I gave Tom Hanks, Elon Musk and Albert Brooks all rides in the Volt. I know at least seven people that bought Volts after I talked with them about the car, most of them from the dealership in Culver City.

When it was time to buy the Bolt I heard from Bunnin, but they had apparently moved up to Santa Barbara. That was too bad, since it was an old-fashioned sort of dealership where if you had a complaint you could eventually work your way all the way up to a guy with the last name Bunnin. I talked to a salesman in Santa Barbara, but it looked like it would be difficult to coordinate purchasing it up there and getting it back to Santa Monica. So I popped down to Culver City to what has become Hooman Chevrolet. It was a ten minute test drive and the Bolt seemed as solid as the Volt was. The seats were not quite as nice, but I drove the cloth-seat version and maybe they were more comfortable with the leather on them. I made a note to bring Nell down to give it a try.

We almost leased another i3, but in the end the car we wanted wasn’t on the first boat from Austria and we didn’t want to wait for the second one. So Saturday morning, March 11, we drove down to Culver City so she could see the Bolt. Walking into the dealership there wasn’t much attention, but finally they got a young guy, Andruw Andrade, to show us the car. There were about half dozen of them there on the lot and he unlocked one for us to take a look. I asked if we could test drive one with the leather seats and he said those were over on another lot, but they had plenty of them. We went around the block in the low-end model, thanked Andruw, and headed home so Nell could continue working.

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There are only two trim levels on the car: cloth seats or leather seats. The “Premiere” model has the leather seats and all of the fancy electronics. It’s really the only choice to make other than color.

I went on the Internet to TrueCar and put in what we were looking for. They forwarded my information as a sales lead to three dealerships, and I figured that Hooman would be one of them. They were, and within an hour Dean Ingles contacted me and promised he could answer any of the questions about my vehicle of choice. Since I had already filled out the information on the web (which appeared to be forwarded to him, he used the information to contact me, after all). He called on the phone and I said we’d been there that morning for a test drive and Andruw Andrade should get some of the credit for the sale. “Unfortunately, we can’t do that.” I’m not sure why.

I said that we wanted the leather seats, and there weren’t any on the lot that morning, but I knew there were cars on the other lot with the Premier trim. Dean said that was true and that it was no problem. We went back and forth on the lease payment a few times until he met what I felt was where Nell and wanted to be on the payment, $358 including tax after a $2,500 down payment. We have excellent credit and I know that our score of 877 means the lease rate is lower, which is more money in the dealership’s pocket. I expected them to be aggressive in meeting our price and they seemed to be.

It was a weekend. Although Nell was writing, this was our time together before our boys returned from college for Spring Break. I had already used a little of the Saturday for the test drive and I wasn't sure I wanted to use more of it to get the car. In the end, after an email reassuring me that he would have the car ready, I decided to Lyft down to Culver City and deal with getting the car.

When I showed up, the car was not ready. A really smart consumer would have turned around, headed home, and selected a different dealership. If the salesman can’t meet the first promise he made (“Don’t worry, it will be cleaned and vacuumed by the time you get here, just give me an hour,” and I gave him ninety minutes), where is it going to go from there?

I filled out some paperwork, which in this day and age seems foolish. I had already supplied my address and other details on the credit application they had used to get the lease approved, why was I writing it again on another form? Since the dealership was making money off me, why didn’t they have someone else fill that out? I tried to be Zen and enjoy my architects’ lettering and fitting the information into the boxes.

In ten minutes I had the forms filled out. Dean hustled away to some closed office and then returned. He said the guy in charge of the finances would be with me in a moment. I asked if I could see the car while we were waiting. “I would, I would, but they are still cleaning it. But it will be ready, I promise.”

I got up and wandered to the finance guys’ office. He seemed to be in a bit of chaos. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to be doing this on the weekend. Finally he came out and talked to me. They had a fancy paperless system for signing the deals. It involved these huge touchscreen desks and networked machines. Unfortunately, out of the four machines, three were now refusing to cooperate and show my paperwork. The one working machine was being used by another customer closing her deal.

Dean used the opportunity to walk me fifty feet to the service area and back. He said, “You’ll get an email from GM asking you about your experience buying the car. One of the questions will be, ‘Did you get a tour of the dealership,’ and now you can say….” I got a tour of the dealership. “Right! Let’s see if that paperwork is ready.” It wasn’t. Dean read me aloud from their poster of “VIP Perks,” as if I couldn’t read. Most of them were not applicable to me (oil changes, loaner car while you are getting your oil change), but he seemed not to care and read them anyway.

When I sat down with Dean I had started the timer on my iPhone. We were close in on half an hour with almost nothing done and no car in sight.

Finally, the finance guy waved that the computer was working. I went in and filled out all the signature blocks and spots for my initials. They ran my credit card. It was wrapping up. I had been there 48 minutes. I showed Dean my iPhone timer as we were headed out to the car. He had the portable charger and manual in his hands, I had all my paperwork. We walked over to the car, the first time I had seen it, and popped the hatchback. It clearly had cloth seats.

“Uh, Dean, this has cloth seats.”

“Yeah, yeah, they’re nice seats, though. This is a great car.”

“No, we’re meant to be getting the Premier with the leather seats.”

“What? What?”

And that’s when the Kafka story started. We had to go back inside, I had to decide if I wanted to just cancel everything, or if I wanted to trust that Dean had made an honest mistake. He showed me printouts of his email to show we had never, in email, mentioned the Premier model, which was true. But we had discussed it on the phone and he had the sales lead from TrueCar that said what I was interested in.

The manager came over and asked how we could straighten it out. He said there was no way they could give me the higher priced car for the lease payment Dean had negotiated. I eventually gave up and said a lease payment of $420 was fine. It felt like the classic Bait and Switch maneuver of dishonest car dealerships, though.

When he was scrambling to get the right car, Dean said he was going to run to the other lot to get the Premier model. He disappeared for forty-five minutes. Eventually I called him on his cell. “Well, my manager called me while I was over here at the other lot and he says I should come back and we’ll just give you that other car, but we’ll put leather on the seats.” That won’t work, Dean, I want all the options that come with that model. “Oh. Okay.” Twenty more minutes. He returns and is talking to the manager. Apparently only the porters can get cars from that other lot. An hour has been wasted.

They want to keep the car overnight to install S.W.A.T., an anti-theft GPS that I want nothing to do with. I am sure it was installed on the other car and that I've already paid for it, but I really just want to go home in the car and I don't want them to add any (additional) tracking technology to the car.

My wife has been texting me. Our dinner with friends is getting a little closer, am I going to pick her up in the new car? I told her to plan to go without me, maybe I could meet her there.

The manager is unhelpful and basically does nothing to help Dean, leaving his salesman to run around sort of hopelessly.

Finally the car shows up, dusty from being on the other lot. I sit in it and it’s fine. They get the VIN and start the paperwork again. I sit in the car fiddling with the electronics. Dean says I need to let them take it up to get cleaned. I say I really don’t want it to be cleaned, I want to sign the paperwork and try to make dinner. He says he understands, but I need to come in and sign things.

I come in and deal with the same finance guy, who has to cancel the other deal, and then we sign all of the new stuff. It goes much faster the second time. I come back out to get in the car. It’s gone. Dean says they took it up to clean it. I pace for twenty minutes waiting for it to come back down. It’s got to be the only car being cleaned. How long can it take to rinse a car and pull out the plastic sheeting?

Finally it comes back down a ramp, dripping wet. The charger is missing. Dean can’t find it in the dealership. They go up to where the car was being cleaned. They can’t find it there, either. It takes another fifteen minutes. The manager of the service department brings the charger over himself and says he hopes I can still give them a positive rating when I get an email from GM.

I drive the car home. It was over three and a half hours at the dealership. I have cereal for dinner and go to bed.

In the morning I send Dean an email and say I would expect the Hooman to pick up one of the monthly costs associated with the Bolt for the remainder of the lease. I gave him three choices:

His text back was succinct: "I just read your email I will give it my immediate attention" Screen Shot 2017-03-26 at 9.49.08 PM.jpg

And that was the last time I ever heard from him, or the dealer.

The license plates for the car went to the wrong address, a house one block away. That’s either another sign of Hooman’s incompetence, or it is their clever attempt to hide a dissatisfied customer from GM.

In any case, I have never heard from anyone else at the dealership, and so far have not heard from GM to check up on the sale or our experience with the car. Not an auspicious start to owning the car, but the truth is these electric cars need so little support that it doesn’t really matter.